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HUNTERS OF THE 
' GREAT NORTH 



BY 



VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 



\°[1A-. 






COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 



PRINTED IN THE U. 8. A. BY 

THE OUINN a BODEN COMPANY 

RAHWAY, N. J 



PREFACE 

When first you leave home to travel in a foreign land 
you receive impressions more vivid than those of any 
later journey to the same country. If you at once rush 
your views and observations into print you are likely to 
have an interesting book but not so likely an accurate 
one. You will probably regret some parts of that book 
on grounds of mere regard for truth, for you will see 
later that you erred both in observations and conclusions. 

When first I went to the polar regions I came back at 
the end of a year and a half full of enthusiasm for the 
Arctic and for the Eskimos. Luckily that enthusiasm 
was translated into the organization of a second expedi- 
tion that left for the North in seven months, and not 
into a book to be published then. As I look over my 
diaries of that time I shudder to think how vastly I 
might have augmented the already great misknowledge 
of the Arctic had I published everything I imagined I 
had seen and everything I thought I knew. 

At the end of my second expedition, after five winters 
and seven summers in the North, I published "My Life 
With the Eskimo" (New York and London, 1913). So 
far I have discovered (with the help of critics and 
through careful re-reading) a half dozen errors in that 
volume. Some of these have been eliminated as the book 
has been reprinted; the rest will be rectified in the next 
printing. 

At the end of my third expedition, with a background 
of ten northern winters and thirteen summers, I wrote 



iv PREFACE 

'The Friendly Arctic" (New York and London, 192 1). 
A comparison of that book with the earlier one will bring 
out few serious contradictions of fact (I hope none), 
although it will show a changed point of view — but only, 
I think, in line with a logical development founded on 
better understanding. 

In the present book I have tried by means of diaries 
and memory to go back to the vivid impressions of my 
first year among the Eskimos for the story of what I 
saw and heard. I have tried to tell the story as 
I would have told it then, except that the mature knowl- 
edge of ten succeeding years has been used to eliminate 
early faults of observation and conclusion. A good many 
interesting stories found in the diaries of my first arctic 
voyage do not appear in this book because I now know 
them to have been based on misapprehensions. In a 
sense, the book is therefore less interesting than if I had 
published it fourteen years ago — but less interesting only 
to the extent in which it is more true. 

The scientific collections made on the expedition 
described in this book are now in the Peabody Museum 
of Harvard University and in the Royal Ontario Museum 
of the University of Toronto, for those institutions joined 
in meeting the expense of my journey down the Mac- 
kenzie. The photographs in this volume are used by 
permission of the Peabody Museum, the American 
Museum of Natural History of New York, and the De- 
partments of the Naval Service, Mines, and Colonization 
of Canada. Single pictures were furnished by personal 
friends of the author — Harry Anthony, Hawthorne 
Daniel and E. M, Kindle. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preparations for a Lifework of Exploration . . i 
Down the Mackenzie River Through 2,000 Miles 

of Indian Country 11 

First Impressions of the Eskimos . . . . 37 
Captain Klinkenberg — Sea Wolf and Discoverer . 47 
The Whaling Fleet Sails Away . . . . . 57 
Learning to LrvE as an Eskimo — On a Diet of Fish 

Without Salt .64 

How an Eskimo Sailed Through the Storm . . 78 
An Autumn Journey Through Arctic Mountains . 88 
The Sun Goes Away for the Winter . . . .100 
Lost in the Mackenzie Delta 107 

An Arctic Christmas with an English Country 

Gentleman 120 

The Life at Tuktuyaktok 133 

Learning to Build a Snowhouse and to Be Com- 
fortable in One 150 

Travels After the Sun Came Back . . . .162 
We Go in Search of Our Own Expedition . .173 
A Spring Journey in an Eskimo Skin Boat . . 190 
A Race over the Arctic Mountains in Summer . 205 
On a Raft down the Porcupine RrvER . . . 220 
How I Learned to Hunt Caribou . . , .243 
How I Learned to Hunt Seals . . . . .261 

How We Hunt Polar Bears 282 

v 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

The Smith Rapids 28 

Str. Mackenzie River Below Smith Rapids , . 28 

Conservative Old Man Wearing Labrets 40 

An Up-to-Date Young Man 40 

Tending Fish Nets by Kayak 54 

Klinkenberg and His Family 54 

The Village and Harbor of Herschel Island .... 60 

Cabins of White Trappers, Mackenzie Delta .... 60 

A Fishing Camp — Sun-drying the Fish . . . . . 74 

A Summer Camp Near Arctic Mountains 74 

Roxy and His Wife 86 

Winter Travel — Arctic Mountains South of Herschel 

Island 96 

Repairing a Broken Sled While the Dogs Lie Comfortably 

Stretched Out Enjoying the Winter Sunshine . .118 

Eskimo Log Cache to Protect Meat from Predatory Ani- 
mals 130 

Building a Snowhouse 158 

Campmaking in Winter . . . . . , . .158 

Breaking Camp 170 

Sea Ice Piled Against the Coast in Winter . . . .170 

The Break-Up of the Sea Ice in Spring 196 

An Umiak and Crew — North Coast of Alaska . . . 196 

We Sailed up the Mackenzie Delta to Macpherson . . 208 

Porcupine River in Early Spring 208 

Autumn Camp of Caribou Hunters a Hundred Miles North 

of the Arctic Circle — Sun-drying Meat and Skins . 244 

Bringing Home a Seal ... 262 

A Woman Fishing Through the Ice 262 

MAPS 302 



HUNTERS OF THE 
GREAT NORTH 

CHAPTER I 

PREPARATIONS FOR A LIFEWORK OF EXPLORATION 

My family were pioneers. In advance of the great 
railways that eventually came to cross the northwestern 
prairies, they traveled by primitive contrivance from 
the west end of Lake Superior across to the Red River 
of the North and down that river to Lake Winnipeg. 
Before them had been the trappers, the traders and 
missionaries; but they were among the earliest of the 
farmer colonists who in 1876 settled and began the proc- 
ess of transforming the pathless and romantic wilderness 
into the rich but commonplace agricultural community 
of to-day. 

Those were days of stern trial. The Indians were 
friendly and to an extent helpful, but the settlers mis- 
understood and mistrusted them. 

After two years of unremitting toil, our family found 
themselves in possession of a comfortable log cabin and 
the clearing of the forest had well begun, when there came 
a flood that drowned some of the cattle, carried away 
our haystacks and those of our neighbors, and left be- 
hind it destitution, which towards spring turned into fam- 
ine. A brother and sister of my own are said to have 
died of malnutrition and some of our neighbors died of 



2 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

actual hunger. The terrors of smallpox epidemic were 
added, for epidemics and famines commonly go together. 

It was partly these difficulties and tragedies and partly 
the pioneer spirit which leads ever farther and farther 
afield that took our family from the woods of Manitoba 
out upon the prairies of Dakota. I had been born in 1879 
just before the flood and was less than two years old 
when we crossed the frontier into the United States. 

For some ten years I grew up on a Dakota farm and 
walked two or three miles in winter to the little country 
school which in those days was in session only a small 
part of the year. However, there were several schools 
in different directions from our farm and it was some- 
times possible for me, when one school closed, to get in 
a few extra weeks at a second school when their terms 
did not happen to coincide. 

After the death of my father we sold the farm and I 
became for four years a cowboy on the "wild land," as 
we then called the prairies that had not yet been home- 
steaded. Our nearest neighbors were ten or fifteen miles 
away in various directions between northeast and south- 
east, but to the west I never knew how far our nearest 
neighbors were. It may have been a hundred or two 
hundred miles. 

In boyhood I read by the dozen stories of cowboys 
and frontier life, and the open prairie was to me a land 
of romance. The buffaloes were just disappearing, but 
their whitening bones lay everywhere and their deep 
trails wound like endless serpents over hill and valley. 
Sitting Bull and his Indians were near enough and power- 
ful enough so that the more sober of us feared him and 
the more romantic hoped that his war parties might some 
day come over the line of the horizon. In my imagina- 



PREPARATIONS 3 

tion I could see myself as a brave scout upon whom the 
lives of the settlement depended, watching from afar the 
camp fires of the Indians. But one day we heard that 
Sitting Bull had been shot and that the ghost dances 
were over. 

Although the buffalo was gone, Buffalo Bill was still 
with us. I never saw him but my elder brother, Joe, 
wore a sombrero and long hair down his back in the best 
frontier style and looked much like him. A number of 
the cowboys I worked with had known him in the early 
days before he started out with his Wild West show. 
Most of them let on they could shoot better and ride 
better than Buffalo Bill. Modesty is not a special virtue 
of the frontier nor are jealousies unknown. 

In another corner of our territory was Roosevelt, gath- 
ering on the open prairie through his contact with pio- 
neers some of the breadth and freedom and vision that 
characterized him later. We did not even know he was 
there, for in our part of the country telegraphs and tele- 
phones were still in the future and the stray copies of 
newspapers we saw were frequently six months old. His 
fame did not spread to our section until it began to spread 
over the whole world. That was after my cowboy days. 

My first ambition, so far as I remember, was to be 
Buffalo Bill and to kill Indians. That was while I was 
still a small boy on the farm. When I became a cowboy 
and began to dress like Buffalo Bill and to put on my re- 
volver in the morning as I would an article of clothing, 
my ambition shifted and my ideal became Robinson Cru- 
soe. That is an ambition that never left me. Twenty 
years later when I discovered lands and stepped ashore 
on islands where human foot had never trod, I had in 
reality very much the thrills of my boyhood imagi- 



4 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

nation when I dreamed of being a castaway on my own 
island or of visiting Crusoe on his. 

At this time there were no indications that I was to 
be led eventually into the career of polar exploration. 
But unconsciously I was getting the best preparation for 
it. On the frontier farm I had hunted rabbits and grouse 
in the winter, ducks and geese and swans and cranes in 
the spring and fall. After I became a cowboy I pursued 
on horseback the white tail antelope. I can scarcely re- 
member the time when I did not hunt with a shotgun, 
and since the age of ten I have been a fair rifle shot. 

But more valuable than anything in fitting me for the 
life of a hunter in the polar regions was my buffeting by 
the Dakota climate. Dakota in summer has the same 
terrific heat that we find in some parts of the arctic prai- 
ries. The Dakota winter is not as long as the arctic 
winter but it is occasionally as cold, and some Dakota 
blizzards are as bad winter weather as any in the north- 
ern hemisphere. I hear the conditions are getting a little 
different after thirty years of cultivation. Farmhouses 
now stand half a mile apart where the cattle ranches once 
were twenty and thirty miles apart, and trees have been 
planted in many places to break the wind. 

Things were different when I was eighteen. Four of 
us boys, all of about the same age, had started a ranch 
of our own. We had picked out a conspicuous hill that 
looked from a distance like the double hump of a camel. 
Our house stood on one hump and a hundred yards away 
were our saddle ponies in a barn on the other hump. 
That year there blew up the day before Thanksgiving 
a storm which is still called by the pioneers "the 
Thanksgiving Blizzard." The weather was warm and the 
sky gradually became overcast. For about six hours the 



PREPARATIONS 5 

snowflakes fluttered down quietly, getting more num- 
erous hour by hour as the wind gradually increased. 

The next morning it was a howling gale. Wiser men 
than we would have had a rope or smooth wire running 
from our house door to the barn door to guide us through 
the blizzard so we could have fed the stock. After much 
discussion as to whether it was safe, I decided that, as 
we knew the exact direction of the wind and as the barn 
was long and stood broadside to the house, I would prob- 
ably be able to find it. I backed out of the door into 
the wind, holding my mittened hands over my face, for 
otherwise the wind takes your breath away. The pro- 
tection from my hands kept my eyes from being filled 
with the snow as I worked my way to the barn. But 
the barn door was in the lee of the building and a great 
snowdrift had been piled up against it. Although I knew 
where the door was I found no sign of it, and I real- 
ized that if I dug down towards it with a shovel the drift- 
ing snow would fill the hole faster than I could dig it. 
Furthermore, I could not find the shovel which had been 
buried by the snow. I considered breaking my way into 
the barn through the roof, but decided that even if I 
made the needed aperture, I would not be able to carry 
hay from the stack to the barn. So I gave up and re- 
turned to the house. 

We did not think much of this adventure at the time, 
but I now consider it one of the most foolhardy enter- 
prises of a career that has been in considerable part de- 
voted to similar things. When we got to the settlement 
months later, we heard of some twentv or thirty tragedies 
that had resulted from this gale. Some farmers had gone 
out in search of their barns, had never found them and 
had been frozen to death. Others found their barns 



6 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

and stayed there until the gale was over, not daring to 
return to the house. Still others found their barns, fed 
their stock, and lost their lives on the way back to the 
house. There were also stories of lightly built farm 
shanties that had been blown away by the wind, exposing 
the occupants to the blizzard or killing them in the wreck. 

At that time I agreed with all our neighbors (we called 
each other neighbors though we were fifteen miles apart), 
that gales such as I have described were exceedingly dan- 
gerous to life and limb. That was because we did not 
know how to deal with them. I have since learned from 
the Eskimos how to get along in a blizzard and should 
feel ashamed of myself if I suffered anything as serious 
as a frost bite from a day out in it. 

During my cowboy days our neighbors were of the 
regular American type, but the farming community in 
which I passed my earlier years came from countries 
in Europe where literary ambitions take the place of the 
money making dreams that are nowadays more common. 
Fully half our neighbor boys talked of going to college. 
Their ambitions were to become lawyers and authors 
and statesmen. For my part, I had decided to become a 
poet, and for this I considered a college education as the 
first requirement. Through circumstances into which I 
cannot go, but which hinged upon the Thanksgiving bliz- 
zard I have just described, I failed in my initial busi- 
ness venture (that of establishing a cattle ranch of my 
own) and so turned to the earlier college dreams. When 
I left for the State University I boarded a railway train 
for the first time in my life, although I had seen railway 
trains perhaps two dozen times before. I had fifty-three 
dollars, wore a seven-dollar suit of clothes, and felt no 
doubt of my ability to work my way through college. 



PREPARATIONS 7 

This all came to pass. I attended the State University 
of North Dakota to the junior year, then the State Uni- 
versity of Iowa where I got my Bachelor of Arts degree, 
and eventually Harvard for three years of post-graduate 
study. 

During this college period I had changed my plans 
many times. My poetic ambitions lasted long enough for 
me to read nearly all the English poets and those of two 
or three other languages. I even wrote some poems that 
were printed in the college magazines. It may seem that 
this was no suitable preparation for my eventual career 
of hunting polar bears and exploring polar lands. I am 
not sure of that. The explorer is the poet of action, 
and a great poet in proportion as he is a great explorer. 
He needs a mind to see visions no less than he needs the 
strength to face a blizzard. 

Somewhere near the middle of my college career I 
began to see that there is not only the poetry of words 
but a poetry of deeds. Magellan's voyage rounded out 
a magnificent conception as fully and finally as ever did 
a play of Shakespeare's. A law of nature is an imperish- 
able poem. 

Ideas of that sort decided me to try to win my spurs 
in science rather than literature. 

The sciences I selected for study were those that deal 
with life on our earth. Darwin and Spencer took the 
places formerly occupied by Keats and Shelley. I dreamt 
of discovering some law of life comparable in signifi- 
cance to the doctrine of evolution. Finally I specialized 
in anthropology — the science that deals with man and 
his works in general, but pays special attention to what 
the thoughtless call "primitive people" or "savages." 

I went to Harvard first to study comparative religions 



8 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

in the theological school, but I later transferred to the 
graduate school to study other branches of anthropology. 
In that connection I became a teaching fellow. Earlier 
in my career I had been a school master for portions of 
several years, but I did not like teaching very well so 
I decided to become a field investigator of anthropology 
in tropical Africa. For two years I used all my spare 
time reading books about Africa and everything was 
ready for me to accompany a British commercial expe- 
dition under military escort that was going into East 
Central Africa. 

At Harvard in my day it was usual for a number of 
friends to form a group and have assigned them in the 
dining room a special table. At meals we used to dis- 
cuss all sorts of things, including what we had read in 
the papers. One day somebody asked me what I thought 
of the accounts then in the press about a new polar expe- 
dition being organized by an American, Leffingwell, and 
a Dane, Mikkelsen. They thought I might be interested 
for I had written and published the year before an essay 
on how the Norsemen discovered Greenland about nine 
hundred years ago, and how they were the first Europeans 
who ever saw Eskimos. But I said I had no keen per- 
sonal interest in the proposed polar expedition because 
my thoughts for two years had been centered upon Africa. 

A day or two after this discussion we were again to- 
gether at dinner when a messenger boy brought me a 
telegram. It was signed by Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, 
and said he would pay my expenses if I would come to 
Chicago to have a talk about going with his polar expe- 
dition to study the Eskimos in Victoria Island who had 
never seen a white man. 

Of all the excited discussion which followed the reading 



PREPARATIONS 9 

of this telegram I remember only that we guessed Leffing- 
well or some adviser of his had read my paper on the 
discovery of Greenland and that this invitation to go 
north was the result. The guess proved to be correct. 

My decision was soon made and I took the first train 
west. At my talk with Leffingwell it was agreed that I 
should join his expedition, not at Victoria, British Colum- 
bia, where the ship was being outfitted and where all 
the rest of the staff were to gather, but at the mouth of 
the Mackenzie River. By the map, these places are 
far apart. But it was the plan of the expedition to sail 
north through the Pacific and through Bering Straits and 
then to follow the north coast of Alaska eastward to the 
whaling station at Herschel Island at the mouth of the 
Mackenzie River. Herschel Island was the place I sel- 
ected for joining the expedition, and for several reasons. 

I had already crossed the Atlantic four times and had 
learnt that one ocean wave looks much like another. 
From that point of view, at least, there is nothing to be 
learned from a sea voyage, and I know of nothing more 
tedious. If I needed a rest I should take a long voyage, 
but I was not feeling in need of any rest just then. So I 
proposed to make instead the interesting and instructive 
overland journey from Boston to the mouth of the Mac- 
kenzie. The road lies through a country which is even 
now a wilderness, although in the seventeen years since 
I made the journey there have been great developments. 
At that time you might have been a well-informed and 
well-traveled man without ever having seen or heard of 
any one who had made this trip. The Indians along 
the route were "unknown to science," although they had 
long been in contact with the Hudson's Bay Company fur 
traders and other wilderness travelers. Mr. Leffingwell 



io HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

was willing I should go by this route and meet the 
expedition at the mouth of the Mackenzie, providing 
I would find some way of paying my own expenses that 
far. I took this up at once with Harvard University and 
the University of Toronto, and the two universities agreed 
to share the expense of the overland and river journey. 
In return they were to receive the information secured, 
and the scientific collections. 



CHAPTER II 

DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER THROUGH 2000 MILES OF 
INDIAN COUNTRY 

I left New York in April, 1906, and traveled by way of 
Toronto and the Canadian Pacific Railway to Winnipeg. 
At that time the Canadian Northern Railway had not 
been completed to the Pacific Coast but the stretch be- 
tween Winnipeg and Edmonton had been opened. It 
lay through virgin country where farms and towns were 
springing up here and there on the prairies or in the wood- 
land places. I have always had a passion for new coun- 
tries and so I preferred the as yet crude service and un- 
even roadbed of the Canadian Northern to the smooth 
track and perfect system of the Canadian Pacific. It 
took a day and a half for the nine hundred miles to Ed- 
monton. 

From Winnipeg on my journey was under the protect- 
ing wing of the Hudson's Bay Company, the oldest and 
most romantic commercial concern in the world and even 
to-day one of the greatest in capital and financial power. 
Lord Strathcona was the world head of the Company with 
offices in London, but in Canada their wide empire in the 
North was controlled by the Chief Commissioner, C. C. 
Chipman, who welcomed me in Winnipeg. With official 
courtesy and great personal kindness he gave me advice 
and saw to it that the "servants" (as the employees of 
this ancient organization are still called) should give me 
every assistance. Through him I met the distinguished 

11 



12 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

scientist-explorer, Roderick Macfarlane, who had been 
to the arctic coast as early as 1867 when the Indians still 
lived in perpetual dread of the warlike and more power- 
ful Eskimos to the north of them who made raids at will 
as much as four hundred miles into the Indian, country, 
the Indians never thinking to make resistance and vacat- 
ing large stretches of country whenever the Eskimos ap- 
proached. Luckily for the Indians, the Eskimos have a 
prejudice against living in a forest in the winter time, 
thinking that a tree shade from the sun may be agreeable 
but having no idea that the shelter of a forest from the 
wind is anything to be desired. Else they might have 
despoiled the Indians permanently of their hunting 
grounds. 

Macf arlane told me that the Eskimo war parties seemed 
to have only one object and that was to secure suitable 
stone in a quarry near Fort Good Hope from which to 
make their knives and the sharp tips of the arrows with 
which they hunted caribou and the harpoons with which 
they hunted seals and whales. They came, he said, in 
singing and shouting boatloads four hundred miles from 
their own country at the mouth of the Mackenzie River 
to Good Hope. The time of their arrival was so carefully 
gauged in advance by the increasing summer heat that 
the Indians had grown to know the proper fleeing time. 
Accordingly, they used to abandon their river bank vil- 
lages in May and retreat into the forest, not returning to 
the Mackenzie again until autumn when they knew the 
Eskimos would be gone. As the villages consisted of 
tents that could be carried away, the Eskimos found noth- 
ing to plunder. It was only when some accident brought 
Indians and Eskimos together that bloodshed occurred. 
If the parties were anything like the same strength or if 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 13 

the Indians were fewer they used to flee, but occasionally 
it happened that a large number of Indians came upon a 
few Eskimos who had become separated from the main 
party. In those cases the Indians would kill the Eskimos. 
I had read stories of just this kind in the books of the 
early explorers, such as Sir John Richardson. It was 
impressive to hear them from the lips of a gentle old man 
like Macfarlane who had himself been in the country 
towards the end of this period of hostility while the fear 
of bloodshed still prevailed though the battles themselves 
no longer occurred and although the Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany was now supplying the Eskimos with iron in place 
of their stone implements, so that they no longer had any 
occasion to make long journeys to the stone quarries at 
Good Hope. It had been one of the earliest tasks of the 
Company to make peace between the Indians and Eski- 
mos. In this they had succeeded pretty well even be- 
fore Macfarlane's time, and still not completely, for Mac- 
farlane himself was once robbed by the most pugnacious 
of all the Eskimo "tribes," the Kupagmiut, or people of 
the Great River, who lived at certain seasons of year on 
a branch of the Mackenzie delta but who wandered far 
afield either in large or small groups. It was with this 
very group I was destined to spend the coming winter, 
though I did not know it when I was talking with 
Macfarlane. 

As interesting as the scholarly Macfarlane was John 
Anderson, who under the title of "Chief Trader of the 
Mackenzie District" was in effect viceroy over a northern 
empire. This was a position which Macfarlane had held 
before him. Although younger in years, Anderson be- 
longed to an older school of thought. He had come as a 
boy from the north of Scotland directly into the Com- 



14 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

party's service. This was in the days when the Company 
had not as yet traded away for money and for other 
.valuable considerations the right which they once had 
actually to govern Canada, administering justice and hav- 
ing even the power of life and death, not only over their 
employees but over any one who penetrated the country 
with or without their consent. Even alter these ancient 
powers of the Hudson's Bay Company had been sur- 
rendered, the tradition of exercising them still prevailed 
and Anderson could never quite understand that any one 
had a right to enter the north country without the con- 
sent of the Company. I learned later that his attitude 
towards all he met there was that of a generous and hos- 
pitable host who, nevertheless, was much on his dignity, 
ready to consider it an affront if anything was done with- 
out his knowledge and approval. He knew his legal 
rights of overlordship had been curtailed but he simply 
could not bring himself to realize it. 

Many who knew Anderson liked him as I did; there 
were many others who disliked and even hated him, and 
chiefly because of his intense loyalty to the Company and 
his inability to realize that "new occasions teach new 
duties" and that "time makes ancient good uncouth." 

I made the journey with Anderson from Winnipeg to 
Edmonton. In both cities and on the way between, his 
hospitality was so insistent as to be embarrassing. When 
once we passed beyond Edmonton this changed like the 
switching on of a light of another color and he became 
more penurious than can readily be imagined. This was 
another of his traits which caused much misunderstanding 
and ill feeling but which a few of us understood and sym- 
pathized with. South of Edmonton he was a private 
person, spending his own money as he liked; north of 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 15 

Edmonton he was a servant of the Company, viceroy, in- 
deed, of a vast empire, but handling only supplies which 
belonged to the Company and not to him. Nearly every 
Hudson's Bay man of that time and many of them even 
to-day have that feeling of trusteeship which makes it 
unthinkable to let anything go to waste that belongs to 
the Company. But few if any carried it to such extremes 
as Anderson. 

To most of us it was laughable. He would, for in- 
stance, try to impress on every one that no matter what 
they paid for their transportation and daily food they 
were not paying nearly as much as the bother of carrying 
them was worth. For that reason he insisted we were all 
guests of the Company and not ordinary passengers and 
we owed to the Company the courtesy of a guest towards 
a host. One thing he felt we should not do was to com- 
mence eating before he started or to continue after he 
stopped. He ate frugally and rapidly but in his opinion 
the quantity he ate was enough and the time was sufficient 
for any one to eat all that was good for him. He ex- 
pected us to stop eating when he did and I for one always 
did so, but there were six or eight other passengers 
(missionaries, Government officials, etc.) who felt they 
were paying enough for their food and that they were 
entitled to gorge themselves if they chose. Anderson 
spoke of them with bitterness as lacking in courtesy, as 
gluttonous and as unable to appreciate how precious 
food is and how many people there are in the world who 
have not enough of it. That was a point of view little 
comprehensible then but one which we understand better 
now since the Great War put us on rations and since we 
have come into more intimate contact with famines in 
Russia, China and elsewhere. 



16 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

A few years before Edmonton had been but a fur trad- 
ing outpost, but by 1906 it was a city of six or eight 
thousand people and since then it has grown to sixty 
thousand (in 1922). The railways did extend west 
beyond it, but not north beyond it, and so we had to 
drive by a horse stage chiefly through sandy land covered 
with jack pine, a hundred miles to the head of river 
navigation at Athabasca Landing on Athabasca River. 
This was then a town of some five or six hundred, half 
the people either pure or part Indian. In Edmonton 
the northern fur trade had been an important topic of 
conversation but in Athabasca Landing it was the only 
topic. 

Below Athabasca Landing two methods of river travel 
were in use. There was a steamer, the Midnight Sun, 
and there were flat-bottomed boats called scows, each 
carrying about eight tons of freight and manned by crews 
of Cree Indians. The method of travel by scow was more 
picturesque and in reality more rapid, as our experience 
showed. I used that method on my second journey down 
the Mackenzie with great satisfaction. On this first jour- 
ney I chose the steamer, not having the northern point 
of view and being prejudiced in favor of steamers, be- 
lieving in their greater speed and comfort. 

A floating log would have outdistanced the Midnight 
Sun several times over, for it took us thirteen days to 
navigate 165 miles down stream. This may be the slow 
record for down river steamboat navigation. There were 
many reasons. For one thing, we used to get shipwrecked 
every so often. Being shipwrecked sounds rather excit- 
ing but was a tame performance on the Midnight Sun. 
She was used to it and knew exactly how to do it. Be- 
cause of her aptitude in sinking, Lee, an expert canoe- 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 17 

man of our party, and also our leading humorist, gave 
her the nickname by which we always called her — the 
Rockbound Limited. 

One of our fellow-passengers was a clergyman new out 
of England on his way to a mission station at Fort Nor- 
man just south of the arctic circle. His was a restless 
curiosity about all things indigenous to the country, but 
he admitted that the more he investigated the more de- 
pressed he became. He told me that he would have 
turned south before ever he reached his subarctic station, 
oppressed with the depravity of the "civilized" Indians 
whom he already more than half-suspected of inability 
to see the superiority of the Anglican over the Catholic 
Church, but for two things which kept him to his job — 
the encouragement of Bishop Reeve, who had seen much 
improvement among the Indians in his time and was 
therefore optimistic, and his own pride which forbade 
turning back from work once undertaken. 

And if his missionary ardors were somewhat cooled 
by the unromantic aspect of lazy-looking, gambling In- 
dians dressed in cheap ready-made city clothes, they were 
no less affected by the mosquitoes. In England he had 
vaguely anticipated the possibility of being tomahawked 
by savages and he modestly doubted whether he could 
have met such a death with fortitude. Martyrdom be- 
fore lions or howling savages could perhaps be met cour- 
ageously in an instant of spiritual exaltation. But mar- 
tyrdom through being tortured for days and weeks by 
insect pests was a wholly different thing. In the stifling 
afternoon heat when (on one occasion) the temperature 
on our boat rose to 103 in the shade, he had to wear 
heavy clothing and even then the mosquitoes crawled 
down the gauntlet of his glove and bit him on the wrist 



18 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

if nowhere else. At other times if he took off his face 
net to get a breath of free air, they stung him on ears 
and nose and cheek. So they stung all the rest of us, 
and we itched no less than he. But we had been inocu- 
lated in other years with the virus of the mosquito and 
had developed antitoxins that prevented inflammation, 
while he was almost fresh from mosquitoless England. 
Wherever an insect bit he became flecked and bloated. 
Then he scratched and rubbed the swellings till they were 
raw and began to smart more than they itched. 

But if he was depressed by the appearance of his 
prospective converts and tortured by the heat and the 
insects, he still felt a mild craving for adventure. He 
looked on the map to see that he was veritably hundreds 
of miles from railway and telegraph, and thereby suc- 
ceeded in half-convincing himself that the country could 
not be in reality as tame as it looked. Somewhere ro- 
mance must be lurking concealed by the tangled under- 
brush. A few times we had seen from our steamer black 
bears hunched up in the tops of trees, and once or twice 
our Indian deckhands had been allowed to go ashore and 
murder these defenseless animals that had been scared 
into climbing a tree by the noise of our steamer. Our 
missionary had no real thirst for blood so he never joined 
in these expeditions. But when the steamer tied up to 
the bank either because night was about to fall or else 
because they needed wood for engine fuel, he used to go 
in search of mild adventure — to discover and report new 
flowers, strange birds or the tracks of moose. 

One evening at twilight he met in the bush a pretty 
animal of black and white stripes, slow-moving and ap- 
proachable. In fact, it was standing still in the path 
before him, so he killed it with a club. Upon the 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 19 

unanimous request of the passengers and crew of our 
steamer he had to change his clothes at once when he 
came back from this adventure. I believe there is a way 
of getting rid of skunk odor from clothing; but our 
clergyman was so mortified that he took no advice from 
any one on that point, put all his garments in a bundle 
and dropped them overboard into the river when no one 
was looking. I think this was his clerical suit, and that 
it was his only clerical suit. However, the Indians of 
the lower Mackenzie were not at that time sticklers for 
form, and probably did not know whether they belonged 
to the High or Low Church, so that his being without 
clerical garments may not have proved a serious handicap 
when he got to his field of work. 

One of the great sights as we went down the river in 
1906 was the burning gas well at Pelican Rapids. The 
whole Mackenzie valley, of which the Athabasca is a 
part, has since been shown to be a country of many oil 
prospects, and oil wells are now actually flowing in some 
places. At that time we had indications of this by get- 
ting our boots smeared with what we called mineral tar 
when we walked along the river bank. 

The Pelican Rapids gas well was a spectacular demon- 
stration of the power and wealth that may lie under the 
surface. Some years before, a party had been there drill- 
ing for oil and had struck natural gas instead. The gas 
has been flowing ever since. Some one had set fire to it 
and it was now burning as a torch, with flames shooting 
some ten or fifteen feet into the air. At night it illumined 
with a flickering light the broad Athabasca on one side 
and the forest on the other. I was poetical in those days 
and wrote in my diary that this was the torch of science 



20 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

lighting the way to the Far North for explorers and engi- 
neers and captains of industry. 

At Grand Rapids Island, 165 miles down stream from 
Athabasca Landing, we came on the thirteenth day to 
the end of our steamboat navigation. There is here an 
island in the middle of the river. The rapids between it 
and the west bank are spectacular and so dangerous that 
we heard of no attempt to run them by boat. They will 
doubtless sometime give water power to a city and to 
factories built in that vicinity. 

The rapids to the east of the island are spectacular 
enough but they are occasionally run by expert canoemen 
and sometimes by the scows of the fur traders. The 
scows are unloaded at the upper end of the island, which 
is about half a mile long. Sometimes they are carried 
on a tramway across the island, and the freight always 
is so carried. Some of the scows run the rapids. Serious 
accidents do not often happen but danger is always immi- 
nent and whoever is within reach always goes out to a 
vantage point and watches breathlessly as the rapids are 
being run. 

It is common that Indians have a contempt for the 
rivercraft, woodcraft and plainscraft of white men. This 
is partly because many white men who go beyond the 
frontier are unbelievably helpless and partly because the 
white men themselves have an exaggerated respect for the 
ability of the Indians and tell the Indians that no white 
man can do certain things which to sn Indian are easy. 
It is human to believe that we excel in one way or an- 
other, and so the Indian readily puts on himself the,white 
man's valuation. 

But it is a fact that there are few such canoemen in the 
world as are developed in certain parts of Ontario. Our 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 21 

humorist Lee was one of these. He had never seen the 
Grand Rapids of the Athabasca and everybody knew he 
had never seen them. But both Indians and whites had 
told him much about how dangerous they were. By 
watching Indians farther up river, he had formed a con- 
tempt for their boatmanship, and when he heard that 
some Indians had run the rapids in canoes he went to 
Anderson and succeeded in borrowing a small new Peter- 
borough that we were carrying to sell to some wealthy 
Indian down the river. Getting into this canoe he pad- 
dled towards the rapids. To the astonishment of those 
of us who knew little about rivercraft, he turned his 
canoe around as he was approaching the rapids and ran 
the half mile of seething water backward. This im- 
pressed the local Indians even more than it did the white 
men, especially as they knew that he had not seen the 
rapids before. 

Below the Grand Rapids we took to the scows and navi- 
gated the rest of the distance to Fort McMurray more 
rapidly and far more pleasantly. We had several ex- 
citing rapids to run, and once a scow was thrown against 
a boulder and broken so badly that it sank just at the 
foot of the rapids and as the crew were approaching the 
bank. The sugar it carried and similar trade goods were 
entirely spoilt. A rather amusing circumstance was that 
a bale containing ribbons of all colors became soaking wet. 
The colors were not fast, and when the ribbons were taken 
out to dry, cuch was found to have upon it a little of the 
color of all the others. I imagined this would ruin the 
ribbons, but was told that the consignment was for one 
of the remote posts on the Liard branch of the Mackenzie 
and that the Indians up there would not mind. One of 
the traders said that you never could tell exactly how 



22 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

those things would strike the Indians. It was even pos- 
sible that this lot would prove more popular than any 
other and might set a fashion so the Indians would de- 
mand similar multicolored ribbons next year. 

There were three things I did not like about our journey 
down stream. The first was the increasing heat. After 
the middle of June we began to suffer from it a good deal. 
One day the temperature was 103 in the shade. It was 
a humid heat and therefore difficult to stand. A tempera- 
ture of 110 or 115 in a desert like Arizona would be 
far less unpleasant. 

Our second trouble was that the mosquitoes were get- 
ting worse day by day. Towards the 20th of June they 
were so bad that they annoyed us even in midriver. When 
we landed they came about us in swarms. If the weather 
had been cool it might not have been unpleasant to dress 
heavily enough so that mosquitoes could not sting through, 
but in the extreme heat it is exceedingly unpleasant to 
wear thick clothes all over your body, heavy buckskin 
gauntlet gloves on your hands, a big sombrero on your 
head, and a mosquito net that is gathered around the 
crown of the hat, comes out over the brim and has to be 
tucked under the collar of your coat so as to prevent in- 
sects from exploring your back. When it is hot you want 
every breath of air and a veil of heavy mosquito netting 
keeps a good deal of the air away. 

Luckily I do not smoke. It was amusing to see the 
bother the smokers had. They would get long-stemmed 
pipes, make small round holes in the mosquito netting, 
and thrust the stems of the pipes through so they could 
puff at them. Occasionally a mosquito would get on the 
stem of a pipe and crawl in that way. This was not so 
likely to happen, however; but when the smoker was 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 23 

through there was a hole in his netting through which a 
few mosquitoes would be sure to find their way. 

It is difficult to describe adequately the unbelievable 
plague of mosquitoes in the North. As you go nearer and 
nearer to the arctic circle they become worse and worse. 
I have found by experience that people will never believe 
the truth about the northern mosquitoes and so, instead of 
trying to describe them myself, I am quoting Ernest 
Thompson Seton's "The Arctic Prairies," pp. 63-64: 

"Each day they got worse: soon it became clear that mere 
adjectives could not convey any idea of their terrors. There- 
fore I devised a mosquito gauge. I held up a bare hand for 
5 seconds by the watch, then counted the number of borers 
on the back; there were 5 to 10. Each day added to the 
number, and when we got out to the buffalo country, there 
were 15 to 25 on the one side of the hand and elsewhere in 
proportion. On the Hyarling, in early July, the number was 
increased, being 20 to 40. On Great Slave Lake, later that 
month, there were 50 to 60. But when we reached the Barren 
Grounds, the land of open bree2y plains and cold water lakes, 
the pests were so bad that the hand held up for 5 seconds 
often showed from 100 to 125 long-billed mosquitoes boring 
away into the flesh. It was possible to number them only 
by killing them and counting the corpses. What wonder that 
all men should avoid the open plains, that are the kingdom 
of such a scourge." 

Of the three things I did not like on our northward 
journey, I mention last the unforgettable cruelty towards 
their dogs shown by most of the Indians and by some of 
the white trappers and traders. 

There are various apparently incongruous things about 
how an Indian treats his team. To begin with, he likes 
to have them fine in appearance, fat, with a glossy fur 
and a proud carriage of the head and tail. This is not 



24 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

easy to reconcile with his insistence that the dogs shall 
jump every time he makes a noise or a move and espe- 
cially when he cracks a whip. To this end he beats them 
unmercifully. I have often seen Indians hitch up their 
dog teams in the early morning, tie them to a tree and 
with a whip that cracks like pistol shots beat one dog 
after the other as they lie tied and helpless in the harness 
until each one of them is mad with fear and pain. Then 
they untie them and the sleigh dashes off at full speed. 

The mind of a dog has the same power over his body 
that our minds have over our bodies. Most Indian dogs, 
therefore, have a cringing attitude which the Indian does 
not really like, for he wants a proud appearance. To 
gain that, he lavishes all his ingenuity and a large part of 
his money upon decorations. There are ribbons and all 
sorts of adornments, and there are bells of every size and 
liquid note that tinkle and chime with the slightest move- 
ment of the dogs. The bells are on the collars of the 
harness and sometimes on vertical rods that stand high 
above the collars and wag from side to side as the dogs 
move. Then there are bells along the backs of the dogs 
and in whatever place is most likely to tremble or shake 
as the animals move. 

If the Indian is particular about what he considers 
good form in starting out in the morning, he is far more 
particular about the style in which he arrives at a village. 
For that reason it has been the custom, in the lower Mac- 
kenzie at least, that the Indians who are coming into the 
fur trading posts will camp the evening before five or ten 
miles away, so as to give their dogs a good night's rest. 
In the morning they are hitched up, beaten and otherwise 
thrown into a high excitement, and then the cavalcade 
dashes at top speed into the trading post just at the 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 25 

psychological moment — commonly the middle of the fore- 
noon when the daylight is already clear and when the 
factor and all the inhabitants of the post have had their 
breakfast and are ready to come out and watch and wel- 
come the arriving sledges. 

This is a partial picture of the dog's winter life as I 
was told about in 1906 and as I have seen it since. Dur- 
ing winter he has the advantage of being well fed, for 
his master needs his strength and wants him to appear 
well. But the Indians have found that a few weeks of 
ample feeding will put a dog into good condition. During 
the summer they do no driving and can make no osten- 
tatious use of their dogs. It is, accordingly, the custom 
to stop feeding them in the spring and let them rustle 
for themselves during the summer. The result was that 
by the time we began our journey down the Athabasca 
(early June) the dogs had already been starved into 
skeletons. They were skulking about everywhere, look- 
ing for any scrap they might eat. Sometimes they would 
find a greasy rag, swallow it because it smelt like food, 
and die in agony because a rag is indigestible and sticks 
in the intestines. 

Every one has to protect his property, and for that 
reason a dog is occasionally killed when caught stealing 
or attempting to steal. So far as dogs are concerned, 
cruelty is in the air. A maimed dog is a great joke. I 
remember particularly a white man who had been in the 
country only three or four years but whose disposition 
was such that he had taken naturally to the ways of the 
Indian. It is frequently the case and was so here, that 
this man was worse than almost any Indian. I have 
forgotten now what it was that he had in front of his 
camp but it was something tempting to dogs. He kept 



26 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

the tent door open and by his side he had two or three 
hatchets. When he saw a strange and starving dog ap- 
proaching his property outside he would watch till the 
animal was about to take a bite, and then throw a hatchet 
at him. I never knew him actually to kill a dog, but I 
saw one case of a broken shoulder and heard of other 
serious injuries. Some of the Indians made claims upon 
this man for maiming their dogs and even charged him 
with cruelty. Judging by how they themselves behaved, 
I should say that this was pretended sympathy for the 
dogs and was put on merely in an attempt to recover 
damages from the well-to-do white man. 

Some of the Indians who were our boatmen owned one 
or several of these starving dogs. It is difficult to see how 
dogs could have affection for such owners, but still that 
appeared to be the case, in some instances at least. Or 
it may have been merely that the wretched things knew 
no other hope than to follow their masters around. Twenty 
or thirty of them kept abreast of us on the river bank as 
we proceeded down stream. The current is now along 
one bank and now along the other, and a boat keeps to 
the current. When we shifted with the current to the far 
side of the stream the poor dogs knew no better than to 
jump in and swim the quarter or half mile of turbulent 
water to climb up on the bank nearest us. The forest 
was thick along the river and heaps of drift logs were 
piled in certain places. This made difficult traveling for 
dogs already weak with hunger, and one by one they 
dropped behind. I did not know whether their destiny 
was to die of starvation or whether they would return to 
some village and perhaps live through the summer. I 
asked the Indians about it but they did not seem either 
to know or care. 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 27 

It seems unbelievable but appears to be the fact that 
even with this treatment a majority of the dogs do live 
through the summer somehow. I was told that Indians 
whose dogs are left behind as the boats go down stream, 
will later in the summer when they are journeying back 
up stream inquire for their dogs from village to village, 
and that they usually manage to pick up most of them 
before they get to their home settlements. 

At McMurray the steamer Grahame was waiting for us. 
She was so much like an ordinary river steamer of the 
Mississippi or Ohio that she is not worth describing. We 
made our journey in her rapidly and comfortably down 
the rest of the Athabasca, then across Athabasca Lake 
and down to the head of the sixteen-mile series of rapids 
known as the Smith Portage. 

At the head of Smith Rapids is a fur trading post 
which was then called Smith's Landing after a man who 
has left his impression upon Canadian history and upon 
Canada partly in the form of place names. These place 
names in turn preserve his history by the way they 
change. He used to be plain Donald Smith and at that 
stage Smith's Landing and a good many other places 
were named after him. Then he became Sir Donald 
Smith and many places bear that name, among them 
none so famous at present as Mount Sir Donald in the 
Rockies that is each year admired through the windows 
of moving trains by about two hundred and fifty thou- 
sand travelers over the Canadian Pacific Railway. When 
his power was at the greatest and when he had become 
one of the leading figures in the British Empire and in the 
world, this same man was Lord Strathcona, after whom 
are named hotels and parks, villages and cities, rivers 



28 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

and mountains and lakes all over Canada and in many 
other countries. 

In the terrific humid midsummer heat I walked the 
sandy road across rolling hills and occasionally waded 
through small patches of swamp from the head of Smith 
Rapids to Fort Smith which stands at the lower end. 
The roar of the rapids could be heard through the forest 
which hid the river. I should have liked to see the whirl- 
pools and waterfalls and especially the pelican rookery 
on a little island, for this is said to be the most northerly 
rookery of that bird in the world. But I had not as yet 
become acclimated enough to the North to have the cour- 
age to fight the mosquitoes through as long and tedious 
a battle as would have been necessary had I clambered 
my way among the boulders and through the brush along 
the river's brink for fifteen miles. Just then nothing ap- 
peared to me so desirable as getting quickly into a house 
at Fort Smith where mosquito netting and closed doors 
would shut out the insect world. 

At the Rapids we left behind our humorist, the same 
Lee who had astounded the natives as a canoeman. His 
job was to build the sawmill which was to produce the 
lumber needed for the construction of a more modern 
river steamer for service on the lower Mackenzie. In his 
main purpose Lee succeeded well, for two years later on 
my second journey through this country I photographed 
the launching of the Mackenzie River, which had been 
built in the intervening two years from the lumber cut 
by Lee's sawmill. She has been plying regularly since 
then up and down the magnificent 1300 mile waterway 
that lies between the Smith Rapids and the head of the 
Mackenzie delta well within the arctic circle. 

The Wrigley awaited us at Fort Smith. The Mid- 




Str. Mackenzie River Below Smith Rapids 




The Smith Rapids 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 29 

night Sun and the Grahame had both been typical river 
steamers, flat-bottomed with shallow draft and with pad- 
dle wheels at the stern. The Wrigley was smaller, was 
built much like an ocean-going ship and had a screw pro- 
peller. It was then believed by many that only a spe- 
cially seaworthy ship with a screw propeller could safely 
cross Slave Lake, a great body of water subject occasion- 
ally to violent gales. There is probably some truth in 
this view. The Wrigley could cross the lake almost at 
will but I have heard that the more modern Mackenzie 
River now watches for a fair opportunity and dodges 
timorously from shelter to shelter in her dealings with 
the lake. Flat-bottomed stern wheel steamers that look 
above water more like a house than a ship are well enough 
on rivers but difficult to deal with on a lake or on the 
ocean. 

The Wrigley had berths for six passengers only. Some 
of our fellow-travelers, such as Bishop Reeve (the Right 
Reverend William Day Reeve) had to have stateroom 
accommodation because of their dignity — not that the 
Bishop himself insisted on it but merely because the rest 
of us felt the impropriety of anything else. Others had 
to be in the cabins for other reasons. But I was a young- 
ster without dignity and more anxious for experiences 
than for what is called comfort. So I used to sleep on 
deck wherever I could and whenever I felt like it. 

The Wrigley traveled rapidly and was so well man- 
aged that nothing special happened to us. In crossing 
Slave Lake we were out of sight of land for some hours. 
This gave us an impression of the vast extent of that 
lake, which is intermediate in its size between Lake Huron 
and Lake Erie. If the large lakes of North America are 
arranged in order of size, I believe they are as follows: 



30 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

Superior, Michigan, Huron, Great Bear, Great Slave, 
Erie, and Ontario. 

Although we had no adventures strictly on our own 
account, we nearly had some because a small steamer be- 
longing to the Hudson's Bay Company's chief trading 
rival, Hislop and Nagle, had run on a sandbar. Far out 
in the lake we met a launch which told us the news. To 
help this ship in distress we turned in the direction of a 
locality known to be infested with sandbars. All of us 
were keenly on the lookout for the stranded steamer. 
Presently we saw her, changed our course slightly and 
steamed directly towards her, until all of a sudden we 
realized that what we had taken for a steamer was only 
a small log lying on a bar. 

It was my first experience with an atmospheric condi- 
tion which is common in the North although not peculiar 
to it. There is a certain lucidity and shimmer in the air 
which makes it especially difficult to judge distance. If 
you are looking for a ship far away and see a small piece 
of driftwood near you, the bit of stick is likely to be 
mistaken for a ship. On certain occasions since then I 
have mistaken for a grizzly bear a spermophile (an ani- 
mal something like a prairie dog or a hedgehog). I have 
known of other travelers who have mistaken a white fox, 
not much bigger than a cat, for a polar bear. Norden- 
skjold tells of seeing a dark mountain with glacier-filled 
valleys on either side and of steering his boat towards it 
until fortunately it dived as he was just about to collide 
with it, for it had been a walrus and the two glaciers 
had been the tusks. 

We nearly ran aground on the sandbar towards which 
we had been led by the piece of wood we took for a 
steamer. We did run aground several times later and 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 31 

had a special way of dealing with that situation. Ordi- 
narily a ship such as the Wrigley will run on a level 
keel, drawing slightly less water forward than aft. But 
we kept the Wrigley down by the bow with a cargo of 
shot in 200 pound bags. When we ran aground her nose 
would stick solidly in the sand or mud. Thereupon all 
the crew and some of the passengers would turn to and 
carry the shot from the bow to the stern. This lifted 
the nose of our boat a foot or two and released her from 
the grip of the mud. 

Having been once deceived by a log that looked like 
a ship, we were more on our guard. Thereafter ships 
that were plain ships in the eyes of some of us were logs in 
the eyes of others. Eventually we really found the Eva. 
She had not had the forethought to carry a cargo of shot 
in her bow to keep it down, and consequently she was 
hard aground along the full length of her keel. We 
passed over to her a long hawser and pulled her off. 

It must have been difficult for Mackenzie, the original 
explorer of a hundred years before, to find the place 
where the river leaves Slave Lake. Even with an Indian 
pilot of some experience, we had a good deal of difficulty. 
Where it heads in the lake, the river is so wide that it 
really is a lake and you cannot say exactly where lake 
ends and river begins. 

Especially where the Mackenzie River leaves Slave 
Lake, but also elsewhere in the lake and at many places 
in the river, there is danger of running on sandbars. 
Eventually when commerce develops, the channel will 
be buoyed and even an indifferent pilot will have no 
trouble in finding the way. It is a matter of great dif- 
ficulty now. Memory will scarcely serve the pilot, for 
land and landmarks are too far away. 



32 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

In rivers of developed commerce, such as the Missis- 
sippi or Yukon, shoals and sandbars are indicated by 
buoys, and pilot launches patrol the channels continually 
to keep account of their rapid shifting. For a sandbar 
that is here this week may be elsewhere next week. But 
in 1906 a pilot passed down the Mackenzie in July, re- 
turned in August, and did not see the stream again till 
next summer, by which time many shifts of shoals and 
channels had taken place. Consequently, the pilots then 
did not try to rely much on memory but kept their eyes 
upon the river ahead trying to tell by the color and the 
character of the ripples made by the wind or current 
whether the water ahead was deep or shallow. It is one 
of the consequences of this condition that when one praises 
a Mackenzie River pilot it is by calling him a good judge 
of water. One day when we had been running aground 
rather frequently, the Captain remarked to Ander- 
son that our pilot might be a good judge of water but 
that he must be a pretty poor judge of land. 

Where Hay River empties into Slave Lake we had 
passed a mission of the Church of England that had a 
fine garden and an especially large potato field. I find 
people commonly surprised when they are told about how 
well vegetables grow so far north, but they would not be 
surprised if they traveled through the country. When 
you are puffing and perspiring at a temperature above 90 ° 
in the shade, the rapid growth of potatoes seems no more 
remarkable than the thickness of the mosquito swarms. 
You rejoice at the one a good deal more than you do 
at the other, but either ceases to be mysterious in the 
sweltering heat. 

On the Mackenzie River proper north of Great Slave 
Lake, we found flourishing gardens at every trading post. 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 33 

The Roman Catholics at Providence showed us straw- 
berries and various garden flowers in front of the build- 
ings, and to one side of them waving fields of wheat and 
barley. Potatoes are cultivated with great success as 
far north as Fort Good Hope, just south of the arctic 
circle. They could be raised farther north, but under 
present conditions it pays the down river traders better 
to buy their potatoes from Good Hope and have them 
brought in by boat. 

The trading posts of the Mackenzie River are on the 
average about two hundred miles apart. Every one of 
them has a series of buildings belonging to the Hudson's 
Bay Company. Some of them have churches or other 
mission buildings and many of them have the stores and 
residences of the so-called Free Traders. 

The name Free Trader comes from the old days when 
the country was not free to trade in by any one except 
the Hudson's Bay Company, and when adventurers used 
to brave the penalty of what was then law and defy the 
Company by trading within its domain. When the Com- 
pany in 1869 sold its sovereignty to the Dominion of Can- 
ada, these Free Traders made a rush for the deeper in- 
terior. At first they fared rather badly, for the Indians 
of that time had been born and brought up under the 
guardianship of the Great Company and were not easy 
to alienate. By the time of my journey this stage was 
over and some of the Free Traders did as extensive a 
business as the Company itself. 

Up to 1906 it had been the policy of the Company not 
to help the Free Traders in any way — they would not 
carry them as passengers on the Company's ships nor 
carry their freight at any recognized tariff. This was a 
shortsighted policy, for it compelled the Free Traders to 



34 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

build their own steamers. It would have been better busi- 
ness for the Company to secure a share of the Free Trad- 
ers' profits by carrying their freight for them at a figure 
that would have been remunerative to the Company and 
still not so high as to make it pay better for the small 
traders to build their own ships. Now when it was in a 
sense too late, the Company's policy was being changed 
by orders from Winnipeg. Anderson was no man to 
carry out such orders. They were a complete reversal 
of the policy under which he had risen from the lowest 
rank in the service to the highest rank. He spoke with 
suppressed fury of the recreant officers in Winnipeg who 
had so far forgotten the dignity and glory of the Company 
as to truckle and trade with the enemy. 

This was a situation I did not fully understand until 
at Arctic Red River when a young man by the name of 
Jaquot came aboard the Wrigley and paid his fare to 
ride with us to the last outpost of the Company, Fort 
Macpherson. He was a personable, well-spoken young 
man whose blood was obviously mainly Indian. Ander- 
son received him with surly looks. Indeed, he could 
hardly be said to receive him at all, for he avoided him 
as much as was possible on so small a craft. At first I 
took this for a prejudice against Jaquot's Indian blood, 
but a little thought showed that this was not possible, for 
I had already observed through a month of close associa- 
tion that Anderson treated Indians and white men with 
an even hand. I think it was Bishop Reeve who made 
the situation clear to me. Anderson had nothing against 
Jaquot except that he was a Free Trader. 

From Red River, we went a few miles north and came 
to the Mackenzie delta, but were still perhaps a hundred 
miles from the ocean proper. Here we steamed west 



DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 35 

across the head of the delta and up the Peel River eigh- 
teen or twenty miles to Fort Macpherson and the north- 
ern limits of the Hudson's Bay Company's domain at that 
time. For many years this post had been under the 
charge of John Firth, an old Orkneyman with a grey 
beard halfway to his waist. Some years before he had 
reached the age for pensioning and retirement, and had 
gone out to live in Winnipeg. But Winnipeg was not 
far enough north for him, and after a year of unhappiness 
he begged to be allowed back into the Company's service 
and had come north to Macpherson to take charge again. 
I am writing this in 1922 and have just learned that Mr. 
Firth has retired a second time, but now to live in a little 
house near the post that has been under his charge for 
the better part of half a century. Like most of the north- 
ern men of the Hudson's Bay Company, he wants to 
spend his last days where he has spent his best days. A 
few of the retired officers live in some southerly land, 
such as Ontario or Scotland, but nearly always through 
family reasons. They have children to educate. I have 
never known one kept south by family duties who is not 
unhappy there and longing for the North. 

I said good-bye at Macpherson to the Bishop and to 
John Anderson, and the Wrigley steamed back south. My 
only connection with the outside world now was Elihu 
Stewart, the Chief Forester of Canada, who was going 
to walk eighty miles west across the mountains to the 
Bell River where canoes would meet him to take him 
south to the Yukon River. There he would get a steamer 
upstream to Dawson and White Horse and a railway to 
carry him south from there to the north Pacific Ocean at 
Skagway. Partly because he needed help and partly be- 
cause I was reluctant to cut the last threads that bound 



36 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

me to civilization, I accompanied Stewart along the old 
Indian trail through the thick brush on the first lap of 
his journey. In a warm, drizzling rain and among mos- 
quitoes almost as numerous as the raindrops, we said 
good-bye at his first camp, which was pitched in the 
spruce woods four or five miles west from Macpherson. 
He would continue west and south, but I turned back to- 
ward Fort Macpherson and the North. 



CHAPTER III 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE ESKIMOS 

My head was full of booklearning about the North. This 
proved to be mostly wrong and consequently I met a sur- 
prise at every turn. A whole series of surprises came 
when I met the Eskimos. I have said nothing about them 
before, but there had been some of them at Red River 
and there were three or four dozen of them on the bank 
as the Wrigley steamed up to Fort Macpherson. There 
were white men standing among the Eskimos, and the 
Eskimos and whites were about the same height. I had 
been expecting the Eskimos to be small and was thinking 
to myself that it was a curious thing that the Hudson's 
Bay traders, Mounted Police and missionary at this place 
should be of such small stature. When I went ashore 
and shook hands with them, I found some of them were 
taller than I, and I am half an inch under six feet. This 
meant that some of the Eskimos were big men. I have 
found since that while Eskimo women strike you generally 
as being smaller than white women the Eskimo men of 
the Mackenzie and Alaska are little if at all under the 
average size of Europeans. Possibly the women appear 
small because they do not walk on their toes as do white 
women in their high-heeled shoes. 

My very first day among the Eskimos I noted the free 
swing of their walk and their independence of bearing as 
compared with the Athabasca Indians they were walking 
and talking with. This brought to mind what Macfarlane 

37 



38 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

had told me in Winnipeg and what I had read in Sir 
John Richardson's books about their formerly aggressive 
attitude towards the Indians and their feeling of super- 
iority over them. This was now confirmed by Firth, 
who told me many stories of the early days when peace 
had been but recently established by the Hudson's Bay 
Company between the Eskimos and Indians. Both people 
felt secure enough so that they met every summer both at 
Fort Macpherson and Fort Red River, but neither trusted 
the other completely and the two kept their separate 
camps. At that time it had taken diplomacy to enable 
Firth to prevent acts of violence. 

In one sense Firth was prejudiced in favor of the In- 
dians. His own wife was half-Indian and he spoke the 
Indian language fluently but could not speak the Eskimo 
at all. The mode of thought of the Indians was, there- 
fore, familiar to him. He knew enough about certain of 
their characteristics to distrust them in one sense ; but he 
trusted them in another sense, for he knew just what 
weaknesses to figure upon. The Eskimos were a much 
more enterprising and reliable people but, in spite of that, 
he had for them the distrust that comes from only partial 
understanding. For certain individuals among the Es- 
kimos he had unstinted praise. 

Firth told me especially about a "chief" by the name of 
Ovayuak, who for enterprise, reliability and a generally 
attractive character was unexcelled by any white man 
or Indian he knew. There was another Eskimo of whom 
he also spoke highly, although in a different sense. This 
was a sophisticated middle-aged man known as Roxy. 
The whalers had given him this nickname when they first 
came to Herschel Island in 1889, at which time Roxy, 
then a youngster, had secured a job from one of them as 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE ESKIMOS 39 

cabin boy. Firth advised me to engage passage with 
Roxy from Macpherson the 250 mile journey to Herschel 
Island. A party of Mounted Police were going down 
also, but they, like me, would be passengers in Roxy's 
boat, for the Hudson's Bay Company had taken a contract 
to transfer certain freight for the Police to Herschel 
Island and they had sublet the job to Roxy. The evening 
of July 30th we left Macpherson in Roxy's whaleboat. 

I now know that Eskimos have no family names. If 
a man's name is John you call him John, and if his wife's 
name is Mary you call her Mary. I did not know this 
at the time and so I noted in my diary that our party 
consisted of the following: Captain Roxy, Mrs. Roxy and 
their daughter Navalluk, about ten years old. Roxy 
was a tall man, with a roman nose, skin not darker than 
the average Italian, with black Chinese hair like all Eski- 
mos, and no beard. Few Eskimos have beards, but there 
was working with Roxy a short and stout man named 
Oblutok with a full but straggling black beard. He had 
with him his wife, whom I called Mrs. Oblutok, and their 
daughter about fourteen years old. As passengers there 
were Constable Walker of the Mounted Police, who was 
in charge of the freight we carried, and two Indians who 
were in effect his servants. Besides them there were two 
miners and I. 

The miners were named Sullivan and Waugh. Sullivan 
was a big, aggressive-looking, black bearded man; Waugh 
was smaller and more retiring. They had turned up at 
Macpherson a few days after I got there with a story that 
they had left the gold country in the Yukon with pack 
horses, had spent the whole spring and midsummer com- 
ing slowly across the mountains looking for gold, had 
eaten up all the provisions carried by the horses, had 



4 o HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

eventually turned the horses loose and built a canoe on 
the head waters of one of the branches of the Peel River, 
and had drifted and paddled down to Macpherson. They 
said they had found no gold nor signs of any. 

Everything went well for 150 miles or more down one 
of the branches of the Mackenzie delta. For a hundred 
miles the trees were still large; then suddenly we came to 
trees markedly smaller. After a few miles there were 
no trees, but only low willow-covered and grass-covered 
islands among which the Mackenzie winds in its innumer- 
able sluggish channels. Where the branch we were on 
came out into the ocean we stopped because the weather 
was bad and a heavy sea was running with waves break- 
ing threateningly over the mud-flats. We were towing 
a boat loaded with freight belonging to the Police. Our 
only motive power was the sail on the whaleboat. Even 
in the best weather it is somewhat dangerous to under- 
take a 60-mile journey as this would be from the river 
to Herschel Island, towing a big and heavy boat loaded 
down with freight behind a small whaleboat with only 
its sail for power. In bad weather it was unthinkable. 
We remained in camp, accordingly, for two or three days 
and then we decided that Constable Walker would stay 
behind with the Police freight and his two Indians, while 
Roxy took the rest of us to Herschel Island. Walker 
favored this plan for the sake of the safety of his freight, 
for we were to send back more seaworthy boats from 
Herschel Island to fetch it. The miners and I were eager 
to proceed, for I had promised Leffingwell to be at Her- 
schel Island on or before August 10th. The miners had 
come with us, hoping to overtake whaling ships at Her- 
schel Island and to secure passage with them for Nome 
and San Francisco. 




Conservative Old Man Wearing Labrets 




An Up-to-Date Young Man 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE ESKIMOS 41 

It had been known to us at Fort Macpherson that be- 
tween ten and fifteen whaling ships had wintered at 
Herschel Island or various points east of there and would 
now be about ready to sail west. It was believed that 
none of them intended to winter, for they had been there 
two or three years, most of them. Some had even tried 
to leave the previous fall and had been caught by an 
early freeze-up and compelled to winter. 

With the freight left behind, we at first made good 
progress towards Herschel Island. This was later in- 
terrupted by a head gale and we were so delayed that, 
although we left Walker behind on August 4th and al- 
though the distance was less than sixty miles, we did not 
sail into the Herschel Island harbor until 12:30 (just 
after midnight) on the morning of August 9th. 

There were a number of whaling ships in the harbor 
and to them we brought tragic news. The terrible ca- 
lamity of the San Francisco earthquake had occurred be- 
fore I left Boston and I had read a good deal about it in 
the newspapers. Never having been in San Francisco, 
my ideas were vague as to which parts of the town had 
been destroyed. I did not realize the deficiency of my 
information until we told the whaling captains and officers 
about the earthquake, when I was immediately besieged 
with questions of details as to which streets had suffered 
most in the fire, and the like. They were anxious for 
just the facts I could not give regarding the fortunes of 
their families and friends. The season was getting late, 
from the point of view of sailing west, and this tragic 
uncertainty in the news made the ships all the more 
restive. It was, therefore, only a day or two until the 
first of them began to leave. 



42 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

A stranger in the Arctic is met by so many new things 
on every hand that his impressions are at first confused. 
Some changes come so gradually that they are not no- 
ticed; others, while they come suddenly, come so many 
together that the impression is not clear. 

One of the changes that comes too slowly to be noticed 
is the gradual disappearance of the night. When we left 
the railway at Edmonton, there were fourteen or fifteen 
hours of daylight. On Slave Lake there were seventeen 
or eighteen, and not far north of that we reached a point 
where at midnight there is still a glimmer of light in the 
northern sky. If we had been traveling with railway rap- 
idity straight north, the next night down the river would 
have been bright enough for reading at midnight. But 
our steamer's speed was only eight or ten miles an hour, 
which the river current accelerated to twelve or fourteen. 
Then the Mackenzie runs northwest instead of north, 
which slows up the advance of the midnight light, and 
we stopped a day or two at a post every two hundred 
miles to do the business of the fur trade. I did not no- 
tice the increasing light enough to make any entries in 
my diary about it until we came to the head of the Mac- 
kenzie delta. We had thought we might see the midnight 
sun there, and all of us were on deck watching for it. 
The daylight at midnight was as broad as it is in ordinary 
latitudes five minutes after sundown, but the sun itself 
was below the northern horizon. Then we stopped at 
Fort Macpherson long enough so that even on the later 
journey to Herschel Island the sun did not rise above the 
horizon, and we never saw it at midnight that year. Still, 
we had several weeks of such bright light that for all 
purposes of travel we got along as well as if the sun 
had been shining all night. 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE ESKIMOS 43 

Next to the sun, we had been looking forward to the 
polar ice with the keenest expectation. The feeling was 
somewhat different, for the reading of many books had 
taught me to dread it. On the way from the river mouth 
to Herschel Island we were in a gale when Roxy said to 
us, "There is ice ahead." The announcement brought 
to me almost a thrill of horror, for I had seen so many 
paintings of ships and boats being buffeted among ice 
floes that I thought it was something like a canoe running 
a rapid or a ship being tossed among rocks. I soon saw, 
however, that the Eskimos were speaking with rejoicing 
about the ice. When I asked Roxy why that was, he 
said there were several reasons. 

Having lived with white men on whaling ships for 
something like twenty years, he knew what my fears 
would be, and so he explained to me that while white 
men dreaded the ice the Eskimos had been living among 
it so long that they were fond of it and not happy when 
long out of sight of it. He and his party had now been 
several weeks up on the Mackenzie River and were be- 
ginning to be hungry for the sight of ice. He explained 
further that it is a great convenience when you are sail- 
ing. If you want drinking water or water for tea, go up 
to an ice cake and dip fresh water off the surface of it. 
This is much less bother than going ashore, and further- 
more the water is fresher and better. 

At first this astounded me, but I have found since 
through long experience that it is correct. If you find an 
ice floe so big that the spray that dashes over it in a gale 
can not quite reach the middle, then you may be sure that 
by going to the middle you will find a pond of the freshest 
of fresh water. Of course, the polar ocean is about as 
salty as any other ocean, and just after forming the young 



44 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

ice (as we call it) is bitterly salt. But during the first 
winter it gradually freshens and by the time it starts float- 
ing around in the form of isolated cakes the following 
summer, it is so fresh that the palate can detect no 
salt. 

But Roxy told me the main reason for his rejoicing 
was that the waves were running pretty high and his little 
girl was seasick, and that when we got in among the ice 
we would have no more trouble with the waves. This 
turned out to be so. The ice floes were scattered. Few 
of them were bigger than a city block in area and there 
were between them half-mile open patches where we 
sailed through smooth water though the wind was blowing 
stiffly. 

This was my first introduction to the sea ice. Through 
many years I gradually became more and more fond of it, 
until I now regard it as the Eskimos do. When I come 
back to it after an absence, I feel like a forest dweller 
who comes in sight of trees after a long journey over the 
prairie. 

Another new thing to me in the Arctic was the whaling 
industry, but it took me a long time to get that straight 
in my head. From many long narratives I eventually be- 
came able to condense the story into a brief statement. 
The first whaling ship had come to Herschel Island in 
1889. At that time some of the Eskimos in this district 
had never seen a white man, although most of them had 
been to Fort Macpherson once or oftener to trade. The 
next year (1890) there was a large fleet of whaling ships 
and they brought in considerable numbers of Alaska Eski- 
mos who had been on and around ships for many years. 
Learning from people of their own kind was much easier 
for the Mackenzie Eskimos than it would have been to 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE ESKIMOS 45 

learn from white men, and it was, therefore, only a few 
years until they changed in many ways. 

When the first ships came, these Eskimos had no white 
men's food and their trading at Macpherson had been in 
tobacco, arms and ammunition, knives and other iron 
goods, cooking utensils, tents and clothing, etc. The 
whaling ships came laden with all sorts of civilized food 
and all sorts of trade goods, and the one thing they lacked 
was fresh meat. At that time the Eskimos considered 
meat and fish about the only things fit to eat, and it 
was at first difficult for the whalers, no matter what price 
they offered, to secure fresh meat or fresh fish. It became 
one of their chief purposes, therefore, to teach the Eski- 
mos quickly to like sugar, bread, fruit, bacon, and other 
things which could be purchased cheaply in San Francisco 
and easily carried north. 

When I arrived at Herschel Island sixteen years later 
this sort of thing had already passed and the Eskimos had 
become so far acquainted with American foods that they 
were willing to consider them approximately one-quarter 
as good as fresh meat or fresh fish. By this I mean that 
in 1906 they used to trade fifty pounds of fresh caribou 
meat for about two hundred pounds of flour and other 
groceries. Some of them still confined themselves largely 
to a meat and fish diet but there were others who ate 
considerable quantities of bread, sugar, dried fruit, etc., 
and nearly all of them had become passionately fond of 
tea and coffee. 

In ordinary years the whalers had groceries in plenty 
to sell, whether for meat or for money. But in 1903 they 
had come to the Arctic outfitted for two years and had 
now been compelled to spend three because of being 
frozen in prematurely the autumn of 1905. They had 



46 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

enough to eat for the time being but it was impera- 
tive for all of them to get out of the Arctic within two 
or three weeks if they wanted to avoid putting their crews 
on short rations. 



CHAPTER IV 

CAPTAIN KLINKENBERG SEA WOLF AND DISCOVERER 

Although I was now myself an arctic explorer, I was 
ill grounded in the craft, whether theoretically or prac- 
tically. As I have said, my plan for two years had been 
to go to Africa, and for those two years I had been im- 
mersed in books about the tropics. I did not even know 
the names of some of the most famous arctic explorers, 
and it is, therefore, not particularly strange that I had 
never heard of Captain Roald Amundsen, though he is 
now famous. I found him and his ship, the Gjoa, in the 
harbor at Herschel Island. 

Although the Northwest Passage had been discovered 
in 1847 by Sir John Franklin and re-discovered by Mc- 
Clure in 1850, and although ships had navigated the en- 
tire distance, no ship had yet gone the whole way in the 
same direction. Sir John Franklin's ships had come from 
the Atlantic side, had attained a certain point on the north 
coast of North America, and had been wrecked there. A 
few years later Captain Collinson's ship had come from 
the Pacific around Alaska and had proceeded far enough 
east to overlap handsomely Franklin's track. Had Col- 
linson wanted to proceed east to England that year, he 
could doubtless have done so, for where Franklin had 
preceded him with ships drawing over twenty feet of 
water, Collinson could have won through with the same 
type of ship. He was, however, bent on an errand of a 
different sort and his purpose took him back west again. 

47 



48 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

Amundsen had conceived the plan of being the first to 
make this voyage traveling consistently in one direction. 
He had approximately followed Franklin's route to where 
it overlapped Collinson's, and then he had followed Col- 
linson's route until he reached King Point, thirty-five 
miles east of Herschel Island, the summer of 1905. Here 
he was overtaken by the same unfavorable ice conditions 
and early freeze-up which prevented the whaling fleet 
from sailing out, and like them he had been imprisoned 
for the winter. Now he had come as far as Herschel 
Island and would already have sailed out had not the 
spring been as unfavorable as the preceding fall. Like 
the whalers he had been restrained by a pressure of ice 
that hung heavy upon the west side of Herschel Island. 

Captain Amundsen invited me to be his guest aboard 
the Gjoa. I had a delightful time learning from the Cap- 
tain and crew, but especially from the first officer, Lieu- 
tenant Godfred Hansen, about the Eskimos of King 
William Island and about various conditions to the east. 
This was of great interest to me, but an event of still 
greater interest came about through circumstances as 
dramatic as those invented by authors who write books 
of adventure for boys. 

One of the whaling captains was James McKenna. 
Once upon a time he had been wealthy. Some said he 
made his money through whaling and others that he had 
made it selling liquor to the natives of Siberia and west- 
ern Alaska. However that may be, he attained prosperity 
and was said to have owned ten or fifteen ships. Perhaps 
because the activities of the United States Revenue 
cutters in Alaskan waters made trading in rum more 
difficult, his fortunes had gradually dwindled until in 
1905 he had left of his whole fleet only the schooners 



CAPTAIN KLINKENBERG 49 

Charles Hanson and Olga. The Olga was commanded 
by an officer whom McKenna did not trust, so he decided 
to promote to the command Charlie Klinkenberg, a Dane 
who had come to the country originally as a cook. 
Before this time Klinkenberg had acquired at least two 
kinds of reputation; one for enterprise, energy and fear- 
lessness, and the other for a character not very different 
from that of the buccaneers of old, or the Sea Wolf of 
Jack London's story. 

McKenna, accordingly, did not trust Klinkenberg much 
better than he did the deposed officer. In that connection 
he got the bright idea of removing from the Olga all 
provisions except food enough for about two weeks, think- 
ing that Klinkenberg would not try to run away with 
the ship if he had no food in it. This showed how little 
he knew Klinkenberg. 

It was not long till a fog came, for fogs are numerous 
in the polar ocean. The Olga had instructions to stay 
near the Charles Hanson, but when the fog lifted she 
was gone and was not seen thereafter up to the time, 
more than a year later, when I arrived at Herschel Island. 
There was a good deal of speculation among the whalers 
as to what had happened. Some pointed out that Klin- 
kenberg, being a better cook than he was a navigator, 
might have gotten lost unintentionally in the fog and 
might have wrecked his ship and drowned himself and 
the crew. Others thought he had sailed a circle around 
Captain McKenna, had probably reached the Pacific and 
had sold the Olga, possibly in China or in the South Seas 
somewhere, and disappeared with the money. Others 
told that Klinkenberg had for years had an ambition to 
sail farther northeast into the arctic archipelago and visit 
some of the islands beyond the ordinary range of the 



50 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

whalers. He had dreams of finding gold and hopes of 
meeting Eskimos who did not know the present high 
prices of fox skins, from whom he could buy at a great 
profit. Some thought accordingly that Klinkenberg was 
now in Victoria Island or Banks Island and would turn 
up either this year or next. 

I had barely assimilated all these speculations when 
one day there was great excitement at Herschel Island, 
for a ship was coming in from the northeast. The keen 
eyes at the mastheads of the various whalers were not 
long in recognizing the Olga. When she came into our 
harbor she had indeed a tale to tell. I was at the police 
barracks when the Olga dropped anchor. Captain Klin- 
kenberg came ashore at once with some members of his 
crew, went to the police and requested that a statement by 
himself and certain testimony of his crew should imme- 
diately be taken under oath and placed on record. The 
statements amounted roughly to this: 

Klinkenberg admitted having run off with the Olga the 
previous year. He had known of an unguarded store- 
house at Langton Bay, some three hundred miles east 
of Herschel Island, where one of the whaling companies 
had a considerable amount of food. He went there, took 
the stores, broke up the house and put it on board his 
ship. To the police he explained that his intention had 
been to pay for all these things. He had then sailed to 
Victoria Island. In the fall he had been off on a caribou 
hunting trip and on returning to his ship he had found 
that some of his men had commenced to make alcohol 
out of flour and sugar. This he could not tolerate for 
two reasons: he wanted no drunkenness on the ship, and 
he did not have tht flour and sugar to spare. They were 
needed for food. The ringleader in the distilling was 



CAPTAIN KLINKENBERG 51 

the ship's engineer. When told he must stop making 
alcohol, he had received the Captain's orders with de- 
fiance and had reached for a gun, whereupon the Captain, 
to forestall him, had shot him with a rifle. An old man, 
a member of the crew, had died of illness during the 
winter; two sailors had lost their lives by traveling over 
ice that was too thin. This was the first version we heard 
of the tragedies that had cut down the Olga's crew from 
nine to five men. 

The Captain's witnesses substantiated his story in every 
detail. 

McKenna's ship was at this time not at Herschel al- 
though expected momentarily from a whaling cruise. 
Some of the other captains wanted the police to arrest 
Klinkenberg for having stolen the Olga. This the police- 
did not see their way clear to do, but they told the cap- 
tains they would restrain Klinkenberg if he tried to take 
the Olga away from Herschel Island before Captain Mc- 
Kenna arrived. This Klinkenberg probably had no in- 
tention of trying. He had a whaleboat which was said 
to be his own property. Into that he loaded his Eskimo 
wife and large family of children, and sailed west. 

After Klinkenberg got away, the Island and fleet be- 
gan to buzz like a beehive. The story now unanimously 
told by the crew of the Olga differed entirely from the 
one they had sworn to in Klinkenberg's presence and be- 
came one of murder. The Captain was said to have killed 
the engineer without provocation, and there were various 
dramatic and blood-curdling details. The old man, whom 
Klinkenberg had reported as dying from illness, was said 
to have died in chains in the forehold, either from freezing 
or starvation or a combination of both. It was said that 
the two sailors who lost their lives had been the only eye 



52 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

witnesses to the killing of the engineer by the captain 
and that the captain had deliberately planned their death. 
The sailors explained their former testimony by saying 
that when the Olga had come in sight of Herschel Island, 
Klinkenberg had called all hands on deck and had made 
them a brief speech to this effect: "Boys, you know the 
penalty for killing five men is the same as for killing four. 
You know what has happened to the four of you who are 
not here to-day. The same thing will happen to the first 
man who tells on me, and maybe to the second and third." 
Then he outlined to them briefly what his own testimony 
to the police would be, and advised them to make their 
testimony similar. They had done so, and while Klinken- 
berg was still at Herschel Island none of them had dared 
to say a word. All this and more the crew testified under 
oath after Klinkenberg had sailed west from Herschel 
in his little boat. 

When the new story got about there was great excite- 
ment at the island and much talk of pursuing Klinken- 
berg, but it was soon agreed that by now he must have 
crossed the international boundary, only forty miles west 
of Herschel Island. There a Canadian police would have 
no jurisdiction, Alaska being U. S. territory. Further- 
more, it was clear that if the American authorities wanted 
to arrest Klinkenberg, they could do so whenever they 
liked in Alaska. 

People who do not know the frontier, imagine that 
criminals can hide in such places as the polar regions. 
Nothing is more nearly impossible. People who live two 
or three hundred miles away are in effect near neighbors. 
News does not spread rapidly but it does spread. If 
one Hudson's Bay trader stubs his toe in January, the 
trader down river may not hear about it till March, but 



CAPTAIN KLINKENBERG 53 

he will hear some time and will not only hear but will 
remember for years. That a man you have never seen 
and who lives a thousand miles away has a wart on his 
nose is well known to you and to every one in your post. 
In this respect the whaling fleet does not differ. When 
you are living in a big city, it seems reasonable to be 
told in the movies or in a novel that criminals go into 
"the northern wilderness" to hide, but if you know the 
North yourself you will know that that is one place where 
hiding is impossible. Klinkenberg's arrest, then, would 
come whenever the authorities desired, unless, indeed, 
he might be able to get "outside" and lose himself in 
the really impenetrable jungle of some big city. 

The Klinkenberg story of romance and horror was im- 
pressed upon me more strongly because there was at the 
island a United States Commissioner by the name of 
Judge Marsh. He consulted with me about various 
things. His theory was that an American ship was Ameri- 
can territory and that it was, therefore, his business to 
investigate the charges against Klinkenberg. He wanted 
somebody to act as clerk to copy down testimony and, 
accordingly, asked me to come aboard the Olga. He took 
testimony from all the crew. It is the gist of this testi- 
mony which I have given above. Judge Marsh later took 
this testimony to San Francisco. A warrant was even- 
tually issued for Klinkenberg. He was arrested by a 
United States Revenue cutter, tried in San Francisco and 
acquitted. He may have been guilty or innocent. If 
he was guilty, he may have been guilty of only a part 
of the charges made against him. But the stories which 
center about this affair have continued since then to multi- 
ply in the North, until now they form a whole cycle of 
legend. Klinkenberg himself still lives in the Arctic. 



54 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

The last I heard of him he was in Coronation Gulf. 

But a story that interested me more was one that bore 
every earmark of being true. The only suspicious thing 
about it was that it seemed too romantic to be true. 

The Olga was said to have met in Victoria Island a 
people who dressed and behaved like Eskimos but who 
did not look like Eskimos. Some said they looked like 
Europeans; others said they looked like Jews;. some said 
that the majority of them looked like any other Eskimos 
but that there were among them a few persons with light 
hair and blue eyes. 

When I discussed this story with the whaling captains, 
I found they paid little attention to it. It was, however, 
in the line of my profession as an anthropologist and so 
I pressed the inquiry, whereupon the captains all told 
me that I had better forget whatever I had heard from 
the white sailors of the Olga and depend entirely on what 
I could learn from those Mackenzie Eskimos who had 
been on Klinkenberg's ship. I went to these and found 
that they confirmed in substance the story which origi- 
nally came from the white sailors. 

The Mackenzie Eskimos who had been with Klinken- 
berg told me that the Victoria Island Eskimos had a 
language differing from theirs only in accent and in a 
few words. After a little intercourse, they could converse 
together easily. These strange people had knives and 
other implements of native copper, which of itself marked 
them off from the western Eskimos. They were remark- 
ably skilful at winter seal hunting and had for that reason 
the great admiration of the westerners. The most strik- 
ing thing was, however, that several of the Victoria Is- 
landers looked to the Mackenzie Eskimos as if they were 
white men in Eskimo clothing. 




Tending Fish Nets by Kayak 




Kl.INKENBERG AND HlS FAMILY 



This map is intended primarily to illustrate the narrative of 
Stefansson's journeys during the time covered by this book (1906-7), 
but an attempt is also made to indicate graphically some of the 
results of his later expeditions — those of 1908-12 and 1913-18. 

The dotted land areas are islands the existence of which was not 
previously known — islands both discovered and explored. Heavy 
black shading shows features previously known to exist but where 
Stefansson's work has resulted in fundamental changes in the maps. 
The barred areas at sea extend 25 miles each way from Stefansson's 
routes on journeys where he traversed previously unexplored regions 
(on the 1913-18 expedition). 



This map shows the territory covered by the narrative of this book 
between July, 1906, and September, 1907. More than half of the 
country north of the arctic circle is a spruce forest, but there are ex- 
tensive prairies along the arctic coast. The prairie is narrowest on 
the eastern margin of the Mackenzie delta (20 or 30 miles wide) and 
broadest near the Colville River in Alaska (150 or 200 miles). Al- 
though the map is as correct as our present knowledge, there are 
uncertainties, and authorities differ on many points. For the north 
coast of Alaska we have followed LefHngweH's surveys and for the 
Eskimo Lakes those of Harrison. These are much the best sources 
available. 



V 



V 



s< 




CAPTAIN KLINKENBERG 55 

The reason for my having come north on a polar ex- 
pedition was that I had once written a paper upon the 
history of Greenland. From my studies of that history 
I knew that something like three or five thousand Norse- 
men had been lost from Greenland about the time of 
Columbus or a little before. No man knew what had 
become of them. Some thought they had died; some 
thought they had intermingled with the Greenland Es- 
kimos and disappeared; and some thought they had 
moved from Greenland to the islands to the west of 
Greenland. It was not impossible that some of these 
might have penetrated to Victoria Island. Neither was 
it impossible that a few survivors of Franklin's last ex- 
pedition of sixty years ago might have escaped starva- 
tion by settling among the Eskimos. No matter how un- 
likely it might be, it was not impossible that the Olga 
had discovered the descendants of one group or another 
of these lost Europeans. All this was fascinating to 
ponder upon and made me watch all the more eagerly 
for the arrival of our schooner, Duchess of Bedford, 
to pick me up and carry me east to where Klinkenberg 
had seen these strange people. 

When Klinkenberg had met these Eskimos with blond 
complexions and with copper knives, he had noted the 
blondness; but what had interested him was the copper 
and he had tried hard to find out where they got it. About 
that he had learned a good deal more than the truth. 
One of his stories was of a mountain of solid copper in 
Victoria Island. This apparently fabulous tale really 
has some foundation, for there has been located since in 
Victoria Island a hill that has a boulder of copper in the 
side of it as big as a piano. There is of course a good 
deal of difference in size between a piano and a mountain. 



56 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

Still, there are many large tales that develop from less. 
The Copper Mountain and the rest of Klinkenberg's 
fabulous tales did not rob me of much sleep. But the 
problem of the blond people never left my mind until 
several years later when I had the chance to visit Victoria 
Island and see them for myself. 



CHAPTER V 

THE WHALING FLEET SAILS AWAY 

A week after I got to Herschel Island Captain Amundsen 
sailed west, and the whaling ships began to follow. They 
were pessimistic about the ice conditions and left me 
with gloomy forebodings as to the Duchess of Bedford. 
Captain McKenna had come in to Herschel Island har- 
bor from his whaling cruise shortly after Klinkenberg 
got away. On August 26th he, the last of the whalers in 
the harbor, was about to sail. We thought he was not 
only the last in the harbor but also the last in this part 
of the ocean, for we had seen all but one of the whaling 
ships start west. The only ship we had not seen, the 
Alexander, was supposed by the other whalers to have 
passed outside the island and to have preceded them to 
the westward. The early morning had been decided on 
by McKenna for weighing anchor, but shortly after mid- 
night a whaleboat came in from the east bringing Mark- 
ley, the second mate of the Alexander, and the story that 
the Alexander had been wrecked several days before by 
running ashore on the rocks of Cape Parry, three hundred 
miles to the eastward. A few hours later a second boat 
came in, bringing Captain Tilton and a number of the 
crew. Captain McKenna now waited for the rest of the 
crew of the Alexander. They arrived during the next two 
days and on August the 28th the Charles Ranson and 
Olga set sail, thus cutting off from the world for a year 
the little arctic colony of Herschel Island. 

57 



58 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

After the ships were gone, the Herschel Island com- 
munity continued shrinking. There is a beautiful har- 
bor, so it is the logical wintering place for ships. This 
year no ships were going to winter and there was no 
reason for any white men to stay there except one or two 
policemen to keep the barracks. Inspector Howard had 
the notion himself that Macpherson, up in the spruce 
forest, would be a pleasanter wintering place than wind- 
swept Herschel Island. The other policemen encouraged 
him in this view on various ostensible grounds but, as 
they told me, really because of the well-known principle 
that when the cat u away the mice may play. Inspector 
Howard was called by his friends a good disciplinarian 
and by the rest a martinet. There was covert rejoicing 
in police quarters when he sailed away, leaving the island 
for the winter in charge of Sergeant Fitzgerald. 

Apart from the police and myself, there were only two 
white men on the island. One was a picturesque charac- 
ter called Chris Stein, whom I judged from his name to 
be a German. I found later that his real name was Sten 
and that he was a Norwegian, a seafaring man who had 
had adventures in many seas and could relate them so that 
they lost no interest in the telling. Aboard ship he had 
held nearly every position from cook to mate, and by his 
own telling he had been in the navies of various countries, 
as well as yi the merchant marine and in whalers. He 
was married to a native woman, whose two brothers, 
Kunak and Kakotok, were among the wealthiest of Es- 
kimos. Some years before, these brothers in partnership 
with two others, Ilavinirk (called by the whalers Ander- 
son) and Tulugak, had purchased from a whaling captain 
the schooner Penelope, which had once upon a time been 
one of the finest pleasure yachts on the Pacific Coast. 



THE WHALING FLEET SAILS AWAY 59 

She was built for speed, had ten tons of lead on her keel, 
and with a good wind could sail faster than any of the 
arctic whaling fleet could go under combined steam and 
sail — or so Sten told me. Through his influence over his 
brothers-in-law and the other owners of the Penelope, 
Sten was now practically master of this craft. 

When the Charles Hanson was gone, carrying away 
Captain Tilton and the crew of the wrecked Alexander, 
Sten began to tell stories that had not been heard while 
his former captain was still in port. Those were to the 
effect that when the Alexander ran on the rocks at Cape 
Parry, she did so bow on, under full pressure of sail and 
steam. The shock lifted her so high out of the water that, 
while she drew sixteen feet regularly, she was now draw- 
ing only nine feet forward and thirteen at the stern. In 
other words, as Sten said, she was as solid as a lighthouse 
perched on the rocks of Cape Parry. 

Sten's account ran that the Alexander had sailed on the 
rocks in a fog so thick that the man at the lookout did 
not have half a minute's warning from the sighting of the 
breakers until the ship was high and dry. The excite- 
ment had been so great and the fear of not overtaking 
the whalers at Herschel Island had been so keen, that no 
time had been lost by the Captain in getting everybody 
off the ship. I think Sten said it was only fifteen or 
twenty minutes from the actual wreck until the whale- 
boats were launched and under way. 

Another point is that the whaling ships carry insurance 
that covers not only the ship but also all the whalebone, 
fur, etc., that have been captured or purchased and en- 
tered into the ship's records. In case of wreck it is 
necessary only to save the ship's papers and the insur- 
ance company in San Francisco will be compelled to re- 



60 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

turn full value for every fox skin and every slab of whale- 
bone lost. From the point of view of the owner of the 
ship, there is, accordingly, no motive for saving anything 
out of a wreck. By these insurance conditions and the 
excitement of the shipwreck, Sten explained his state- 
ment that the Captain's cabin was full of silver fox skins 
and other items of priceless value, while all the ship's 
gear, including chronometers, was still on board. There 
were even said to be gold watches hanging on the walls 
of the cabins of the various officers. 

Sten came to me with this story, wanting me to join 
him on the Penelope to sail east and plunder the wrecked 
Alexander. But I was still hoping for the arrival of my 
own ship, the Duchess of Bedford, and although plunder- 
ing a wreck on the most remote cape of arctic Canada 
would have been a great adventure, I felt still keener in- 
terest in the unknown Eskimos of Victoria Island beyond, 
especially now that I had hea?rd from Captain Klinken- 
berg that some of them looked like Europeans. I ac- 
cordingly declined Sten's offer, saying I would have to 
wait near Herschel until the actual freezing of the ocean 
made it certain that my own ship could not come. I told 
him I would then go with him by sled. He said that 
would be too late, for a trapper by the name of Fritz 
Wolki was living only about a hundred miles from Cape 
Parry and would be sure to get to the Alexander ahead 
of any sled party we could organize. Wolki was the only 
white man living on the north coast of Canada that win- 
ter, except Sten and the rest of us at Herschel Island. 

Sten told me he would try to get Eskimos enough to 
man the Penelope. Of his success in that we shall learn 
later. 

The other white man at Herschel Island was Alfred H. 




Cabins of White Trappers, Mackenzie Delta 




The Village and Harbor of Herschel Island 



THE WHALING FLEET SAILS AWAY 61 

Harrison, who has since written a book called "In Search 
of an Arctic Continent." He was really in search of this 
continent but had not been getting along very well, and 
through no fault of his own. He had a theory, which 
would have seemed tame enough to Admiral Peary or to 
any one used to reading the books of polar exploration. 
But to the whalers and Eskimos around Herschel Island, 
it was exactly what they called it, "a harebrained 
scheme." The Canadian and Alaskan Eskimos are in 
great fear of the ocean ice. In winter they make their 
living upon it in the vicinity of land, but seldom venture 
more than five miles from shore, and never willingly more 
than ten. The whalers had little book knowledge of 
polar exploration, but had been for twenty years in 
Alaska where sledge travel on moving ice is little under- 
stood, and they were greatly impressed with the danger 
and impracticability of it. 

With no first-hand knowledge of sea ice, but filled with 
the lore of books, Harrison had come down the Mackenzie 
intending to go from there to Cape Bathurst and across 
by sled to Banks Island. Fifteen years later, this had 
become such a commonplace that an old Eskimo employee 
of mine, accompanied only by his wife who was rather 
sickly, made the journey between Banks Island and Cape 
Bathurst without difficulty. Harrison, however, was fif- 
teen years ahead of his time, and when he proposed to 
the whalers and the Cape Bathurst Eskimos that they 
should sell him an outfit and some of them accompany 
him on this journey, they thought him crazy. 

Harrison had come North accompanied by Hubert 
Darrell, a man who had made a good pioneer journey 
with David Hanbury from Chesterfield Inlet to the arctic 
coast of Canada, then west to the Coppermine River, up 



62 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

that river and across to Bear Lake and the Mackenzie. 

Darrell was one of the best winter travelers that ever 
came to the North, but he knew overland travel only and 
was convinced by the whalers and Eskimos that attempt- 
ing to accompany Harrison over the ice to Banks Island 
would be suicidal. From this and from other causes the 
partnership between Harrison and Darrell had broken 
up the winter before I arrived in the Arctic. Darrell was 
now trapping in the forest country some two hundred 
miles south, but Harrison was still on the coast trying to 
get Eskimos to go with him to Banks Island. By August, 
1906, when I met him, he had given up hope of doing 
anything that year beyond exploring the mainland east 
of the Mackenzie River and mapping the great bodies of 
water known as the Eskimo Lakes. Eventually he ac- 
complished this, and you will find notable differences be- 
tween the maps of that section if you compare those that 
preceded Harrison with the ones he made. 

Harrison had engaged for the winter the family of Ka- 
kotok, Sten's brother-in-law and part owner of the Pene- 
lope. At first there had been some thought of using the 
Penelope, but when Captain Tilton came to Herschel Is- 
land with the whaleboats saved from the wreck of the 
Alexander, Harrison bought one of these and decided to 
use it to carry him to the Eskimo Lake country. He in- 
vited me to take passage in this boat with him as far east 
as I cared to go, and to spend the winter with him if I 
liked. I did not dare to go beyond Shingle Point, how- 
ever, but took the chance to go that far. I left a memo- 
randum with the police at Herschel Island to give to the 
Duchess of Bedford, should she come, telling her to pick 
me up at Shingle Point if she was going to proceed farther 
east that year. 



THE WHALING FLEET SAILS AWAY 63 

My journey with Harrison from Herschel Island to 
Shingle Point was merely a fifty-mile boat voyage with- 
out adventure. He pitched camp for a few days on the 
sandspit there for fishing purposes, and partly also with a 
friendly desire to wait around to see if I would not change 
my mind about taking a chance with the Eskimos. He 
argued that the season was now so late that the Duchess 
was not likely to come and that I had better go with him 
east. He had half a dozen sacks of flour and several 
other items of white men's fare, and his offer to share 
these with me was a generous one from the point of view 
of any ordinary white man, for no one who has not lived 
with the Eskimos in their houses and on their food is 
likely to think in advance that it is going to be pleasant. 
I did not think that it was going to be exactly pleasant, 
but I told Harrison that in case my ship did not come 
I had made up my mind to live as an Eskimo with the 
Eskimos for the purpose of learning their language and 
customs and becoming as intimate with them as possible. 
You can never live in your own house as a neighbor to 
people of a strange race and expect to get an intimate 
view of their lives through visiting them no matter how 
frequently. 

On September 3rd Harrison's whaleboat and five others 
owned by Eskimos sailed east from Shingle Point, and I 
began my apprenticeship at living as an Eskimo among 
the Eskimos. 



CHAPTER VI 

LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO — ON A DIET OF FISH 
WITHOUT SALT 

Our village at Shingle Point that fall was never for long 
of any one size. It was a tent village. Sometimes there 
were only three or four tents and sometimes there were 
thirteen or fourteen, for people kept going and coming. 
Mostly the Eskimos were on their way from Herschel 
Island to some point east of us on the coast or on some 
branch of the Mackenzie delta where they intended to 
spend the winter. Those who chose the coast would be 
for that winter fishermen exclusively, for seals are not 
found in any number so near the Mackenzie on account 
of the fresh water. 

The Mackenzie is almost as large a river as the Missis- 
sippi and brings down so much fresh water that ships at 
sea, even out of sight of land, can drop their buckets 
overboard and dip up good drinking water. We estimate 
that Shingle Point is about twenty miles west of the 
Mackenzie (there is no certain line where a river delta 
ends and the ocean proper begins) and still the water in 
the ocean outside our camp was commonly as fresh as 
in a mountain brook. At King Point, fifteen miles west 
of us, it was fresh about half the time, and even at 
Herschel Island, more than sixty miles west of the Mac- 
kenzie, it was likely to be fresh or nearly so whenever 
there was a protracted calm or when the wind blew from 
the east. 

64 



LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO 65 

The Eskimos going up the Mackenzie expected to live 
partly by fishing and partly by hunting moose, rabbits 
and ptarmigan. Those who left their boats on the coast 
and traveled inland by pack dog towards the mountains 
expected to live mainly on caribou, with an occasional 
mountain sheep in some places and ptarmigan everywhere. 
No matter where they lived, these hunters were also going 
to trap for the skins of various animals. In the Mac- 
kenzie delta they would get beaver, marten, mink, lynx 
and the various foxes — silver, cross, red, blue and white. 

Most valuable of all these skins is that of the silver 
fox, worth at that time as much as five hundred dollars 
even to the Eskimos and a great deal more than that to 
the traders who dealt with them. The cross and red 
foxes are more numerous and therefore less valuable 
members of the same family. There may be cross, red 
and silver foxes in one litter. But the white and blue 
foxes are only distant cousins of the others and are little 
more than half the size. Just as red, cross and silver 
may belong to one litter, so the blue and white may be- 
long to one litter. On the arctic coast there are about 
a hundred white foxes for one blue fox. Among the dark 
foxes, the silver are the rarest and the reds the most 
common. There are perhaps four or five silver foxes to 
a hundred reds. Of course, the silver foxes are of varying 
grades, approaching more and more closely to cross fox, 
and it may be that the ratio of perfect silver foxes (which 
are called black foxes) to the red is not far from the 
one to a hundred ratio which applies to blue and white. 

We were all going to trap foxes later in the year, but 
just after Harrison left us our energies were bent on fish- 
ing. Some years earlier caribou had been in the habit of 
coming down to the coast frequently, but the Eskimos told 



66 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

me that during the last few years they had been so much 
hunted by natives in the employ of the whalers that none 
were to be expected now north of the mountains, which 
were twenty or thirty miles inland. 

At Shingle Point we were looking forward to a winter 
of nothing to eat but fish. In recent years the Eskimos 
had been able to buy from the ships all the groceries 
they wanted, but they had never wanted very much. In 
fact, the whalers had been coaxing and almost forcing 
the Eskimos to eat groceries so as to get from them in 
exchange more fresh meat and fish to use on shipboard. 
This year the condition was entirely different. The 
whalers had been compelled by the accident of an early 
freeze-up to spend the previous winter in the Arctic. The 
summer of 1906 they were so short of groceries that none 
of the Eskimos had been able to buy any appreciable 
quantity. 

There had been the expectation that one or two ships 
would come in from the west, and we had all been hoping 
to buy from them. Mr. Harrison had had the forethought 
to wheedle some groceries out of one of the whalers before 
they had given up hope of a western ship coming in. 
That is how he came to have the flour and other things 
I have mentioned. I did not try to buy anything, for I 
was at first expecting my own ship any day. The 
Eskimos had tried their best to buy, but had been able 
to get nothing except tea and a little flour. The flour 
they had secured from Captain McKenna and that only 
because some gasoline had been spilt upon two or three 
dozen sacks and they were fairly soaked and reeking with 
it. The Eskimos I was living with had secured a few of 
these sacks and occasionally they used to make some 
pancakes or doughnuts fried in seal oil. I had as yet a 



LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO 67 

strong prejudice against seal oil. Although that pre- 
judice was strong, I found the gasoline taste even more 
disagreeable. And for a special reason the fish, which 
was the main item of diet, was to me most distasteful 
of all. 

I grew up with two main food prejudices. I cannot 
remember the time when I did not hear my mother ex- 
plain to the neighbor women that I could neither drink 
chocolate nor eat fish. I do not remember what reason 
she assigned for my inability to drink chocolate, but I 
remember well how she used to explain that my unwill- 
ingness to eat fish had its reason in the famine which came 
on our frontier community when I was in my first year. 
The cows had died and there had been no milk, and she 
had been compelled to feed me on boiled fish made into 
a sort of mush. She used to say, and the neighbor women 
used to agree with her, that it was no wonder I had ac- 
quired a prejudice against fish. It was taken for granted 
by them, by my mother and by me that this inability to 
eat fish would mark me throughout life. In school and 
college, at boarding houses and private dinners, I always 
omitted the fish course and always used to explain that I 
differed from ordinary people in my inability to eat fish. 
Similarly, I avoided chocolate until I was something like 
twenty. I cannot remember now how it came about, but 
either inadvertently or as an experiment I tasted choco- 
late and found to my surprise that it was not bad. Grad- 
ually I got to like chocolate but the abhorrence of fish 
persisted. I used to taste fish gingerly once or twice a 
year. This was usually done in connection with the 
stories I was telling of how disagreeable it was; it gave 
effective emphasis to my stories if I grimaced at the diffi- 
culty of swallowing even the tiniest bit of fish. 



68 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

But now I was face to face with a winter of nothing 
but fish — fish without salt or tea or anything else. The 
gasoline flour would soon give out if we ate any of it. 
The Eskimos had about half enough tea to last the winter. 
They were exceedingly fond of tea and I did not care 
for it, so that from the first I voluntarily left that all to 
them and lived on fish and water. There are no more 
hospitable people in the world than the Eskimos, and 
they never allowed a meal to pass without trying to coax 
me into drinking tea. But as the taste had no attraction 
for me, I was easily able to resist. I always did prefer 
water to any concocted drink. 

As to the absence of salt, that was due to an oversight. 
Had I thought of asking for it, Harrison would have 
given me some before he left. One reason why I did 
not ask him may have been my subconscious idea that 
I could secure salt by boiling down sea water. At 
Shingle Point this was ordinarily not possible, because 
the ocean was not salty. However, there was an occa- 
sional westerly gale which brought the salt ocean to 
Shingle Point. On such occasions I took potfuls of brine 
and boiled it down to a thick scum on the bottom of the 
pot. Thereby I learned some chemistry, for the taste 
was not particularly salty. It was rather bitter, for (as 
the chemists tell us) the sea contains a great many 
stFong tasting substances besides ordinary table salt. 

I used to write pages in my diary about my troubles 
with the fish diet, and a continual refrain was that it 
would not be so bad if I only had salt. I used to get up 
early in the morning and go hunting inland. To meet 
a caribou that had wandered down from the mountains 
was less than one chance in a hundred; although I 
hunted day after day I never saw a caribou or sign of 



LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO 69 

any. But that was not why I was hunting. I was trying 
to get up an appetite. I would commonly start, without 
breakfast, at any time from five to nine in the morning 
and would walk until from four to six in the afternoon. 
When the Eskimos saw me coming across the hills to- 
wards camp, it was the regular job of Navalluk, the little 
ten-year-old daughter of Roxy, to pick out a salmon 
trout just fresh from the water and weighing about a 
pound and a half. She would clean it and put it on a 
spit beside the camp fire and have it beautifully roasted 
against my arrival. Had I been a normal person fond 
of fish I should have found it delicious. As a matter of 
fact I used to nibble chiefly at those parts that had been 
burnt nearly to a crisp in the roasting, leaving untasted 
what another would have eaten by preference. 

But gradually and almost without noticing it, I began 
to eat more and more of the fish, until at the end of ten 
days or so I was eating square meals. For a while it 
was only the best fish specially prepared, but in another 
week or two I began to join the Eskimos at their potfuls 
of boiled fish. They told me that fish heads were best 
of all, but this I could not believe, and it was not until 
midwinter that I finally decided to try. I found then 
that they were right and have since agreed that the heads 
are the best parts of most fishes. Later I came to find 
that this applies to caribou no less, and I am now of the 
opinion that heads generally are the best parts of ani- 
mals, or at least seem so to people who are living on an 
exclusively meat diet. The northern meat-eating Indians 
all agree with the Eskimos in this, and so do all those 
white men I know who have ever lived for long periods 
on a hundred per cent, meat diet. 

Our fishing methods at Shingle Point were peculiar. 



70 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

The fish that were running in the largest numbers are 
called by the whalers "white fish," though they do not 
resemble closely our commercial whitefish. The Eskimos 
call them kaktat. The water was clear and the fish were 
wary. They could not be netted in daytime unless there 
was a heavy surf rolling in from the sea that muddied 
up the water so they could not see the nets. 

As I remember them, the nets we used were about three 
feet wide and about thirty feet long. Sometimes they 
were set out by Eskimos in kayaks, but ordinarily we 
used a long stick to shove them out. The Eskimos would 
find a straight-grained log of driftwood on the beach. 
This they would split and adze into rods each the full 
length of the log and two or three inches in diameter. 
They would then splice several of the rods together, end 
on end, making a pole perhaps sixty and even a hundred 
feet long and so weak that it could not stand its own 
weight. If you picked it up by the middle the two ends 
would remain on the ground, and if you raised the middle 
high enough the rod would break. These rods were 
dragged about the beach rope-fashion, and when we came 
to places where nets were to be set we would slip upon 
the tip of the pole a loop that was fast to one end of 
the net and shove it out upon the surface of the water. 
In that way the net was set so that the outer end was 
perhaps sixty or seventy feet from the beach and the 
near end thirty or forty feet away. 

The catch varied on different nights. When the run 
was good, two or three men could be kept busy tending 
two or three nets. You would pull in a net and find the 
fish stuck in it almost as thick as they could be. There 
was not a fish in every mesh, but a person seeing the 
quivering mass pulled in would have said that there was. 



LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO 71 

We would pull the fish out as quickly as we could and 
throw them in a pile inland, then shove out the net and 
walk to the second net. We would similarly empty that 
and then pull in the third net. By the time that was 
done we would go back to the first net, pull it in and 
find it just as full as it was the time before. We never 
counted the fish but I should say that on a good night 
three or four of us caught between one and two thou- 
sand, giving from fifteen hundred to three thousand 
pounds of food. 

The hardest work of the women came during the day. 
With half-moon-shaped steel knives as sharp as razors 
they cut open the fish, cleaned them, removed the back- 
bone and hung up the rest to dry. This was done 
when the run of fish was not very rapid. When large 
quantities were being caught, the women did not have 
time to remove the backbones, but merely cleaned the 
fish and threw them into enclosures made log cabin 
fashion out of pieces of driftwood. When the fish in each 
of these boxes were three or four feet deep, the whole 
thing wculd be roofed over with a pile of logs, thus fur- 
nishing adequate protection from dogs and foxes and 
indeed from any animal except a polar bear. Even from 
bears these caches were safe so long as the fish were per- 
fectly fresh, for a polar bear does not hunt fish and does 
not seem to recognize the smell of fresh fish as the smell 
of food. But caches containing "high" fish will be 
broken into by bears — probably because all rotten meats 
and rotten fishes smell much alike. 

I had read in books that the Eskimos eat their food 
raw, but found little of this. The Mackenzie people are 
no more likely to eat a fresh fish raw than we are to eat 
a beefsteak raw. I have seen butchers and cooks eat 



72 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

small pieces of raw steak and similarly I have seen 
Eskimos on rare occasions take a mouthful of raw fresh 
fish. 

But fish in another condition they do eat raw. On 
account of the difficulty of netting in daylight in clear 
weather, there is little fishing on Shingle Point during 
the midsummer while the sun never sets. The natives, 
therefore, look forward eagerly to the coming of the dark 
nights. A few fish are summer-caught, however, and 
they are put in bins and protected from the sun by piles 
of logs. Although it is extremely hot in summer when 
you are twenty or thirty miles inland (perhaps 80 ° or 
90 ° in the shade), the temperature on a sandspit sur- 
rounded by ocean water as Shingle Point was, is seldom 
above 60 ° or 70 °, and frequently around 40 ° or 50 °. 
Therefore, the fish did not decay rapidly, but became 
high, somewhat in the sense in which venison and game 
are allowed to become high in our markets. Fish thai; 
has a high or gamey taste is seldom cooked and indeed 
seldom eaten at all during the summer. But when winter 
comes and the fish are frozen, they are sometimes 
brought into the house in that condition. An armful of 
them is thrown upon the floor and allowed to lie there 
until they are half-thawed, so that they are about of the 
consistency of ice cream — they are still frozen, but 
nevertheless are so soft you can easily cut them with a 
knife or bite chunks out of them. At that stage the skin 
is stripped off and they are eaten by the Eskimos very 
much as we eat corn on the cob. The backbone and 
ribs form the core and are thrown away or given to the 
dogs, as we reject the cob after eating the corn. 

At first I was horrified at seeing people eating high, 
raw fish. But when I came to think of it, it did not seem 



LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO 73 

any more remarkable that some people should like high 
fish than that some people should like "strong" cheeses 
or high venison and pheasants. Neither is it any more 
remarkable that the Eskimos eat raw fish than that the 
Japanese and Norwegians do so. Furthermore, there is 
no essential difference between eating raw fish and raw 
oysters. After all, what is the difference between eating 
a thing raw and eating a thing "rare?" When you order 
a big steak "underdone" you get a little meat on the 
outside that is cooked and a lot of meat on the inside 
that is raw. If you try on your friends the experiment 
of just calling raw meat rare, you will see that it helps 
a lot in making it easier to swallow. 

At least it helped with me. By the time I had gone 
through all the above reasoning (which it did not occur 
to me to do for several weeks) I one day tried the 
frozen fish and found it not so bad. Each time I tried 
it I liked it a little better, and eventually I got so fond 
of it that I agreed with the Eskimos in preferring it to 
cooked fish "for a change." 

I had not yet been thoroughly broken in to the fish 
diet nor had I become completely used to many other 
strange features of my life with the Eskimos, when one 
day a schooner was seen coming along from the west. 
At first I thought it was the Duchess of Bedford but the 
Eskimos presently recognized her as the Penelope. She 
dropped anchor half a mile outside of our camp and a 
boat came ashore, bringing Sten and two of the part- 
owners of the Penelope, his brother-in-law Kunak and 
the junior partner Tulugak. Sten said they were on 
their way at last toward Cape Parry to make their for- 
tunes plundering the wreck of the Alexander. 

The visitors received a jolly welcome from us, as all 



74> HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

traveling parties did. A part of this welcome always was 
a meal. To me this particular one was an especial feast, 
for Sten had brought ashore with him some flour that 
had no gasoline in it, and some molasses. We had dough- 
nuts of exceptional quality. I eventually got so that I 
liked the taste of things fried in seal oil as well as I 
like similar things fried in lard, but with doughnuts 
properly made this is hardly a question. If the oil or 
lard is kept so hot that it is almost burning, you can 
cook doughnuts in either without leaving an appreciable 
taste. This is especially true if porousness is avoided 
by leaving out the baking powder, thus getting grease- 
proof glazing on the outside — like that of pretzels. 

At the end of the feast Sten arose to go aboard ship, 
whereupon it developed that there was a hitch in his 
plans. His Eskimo crew had decided that Fritz Wolki, 
two hundred miles to the east of us, must surely have 
reached the wrecked ship by now and that there was no 
point in anybody else going there. Sten was of a dif- 
ferent opinion. The Eskimos, with the greatest good 
nature, replied that it would be all right for him to go 
but that they personally were inclined to stay. Some 
would camp right here at Shingle Point, and the rest of 
his crew would go inland to the mountains to hunt 
caribou. Sten became angry and threatened and blus- 
tered a good deal, but without any effect either in mak- 
ing the Eskimos angry or in changing their course. 

Sten was of a naturally equable disposition and, fur- 
thermore, knew the Eskimos well by now. He soon saw 
the case was hopeless, and made them a new proposition. 
This was that a few of them should go back with him 
on the Penelope fifteen miles up the coast to King Point, 
where Captain Amundsen had left a cabin and where 




A Fishing Camp — Sun-drying the Fish 




A Summer Camp Near Arctic Mountains 



LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO 75 

Sten himself had another cabin from the previous winter, 
for he had that year been shipwrecked near King Point 
in a schooner, the Bonanza. The wreck had been partly 
salvaged, and there was a good deal of valuable prop- 
erty ashore. The Penelope was now to fetch this 
property to Shingle Point where Sten would spend the 
winter with us. 

This would not take more than three or four days 
and a sufficient number agreed to help. Sten asked me 
to join in the enterprise and we sailed to King Point, 
tore down his house but not Amundsen's, and loaded the 
ship with whatever seemed valuable — lumber, carpenter 
tools, ropes and the like. The whole was landed at 
Shingle Point inside the week and with the help of sev- 
eral Eskimos and myself Sten soon had a comfortable 
house built. In this he invited me to spend the winter 
with h/m, but I declined again for the same reason as I 
had declined Harrison's previous invitation. Learning 
all about the Eskimos was my object in coming North, 
so I decided I would live with them and occasionally 
visit Sten, instead of living with Sten and occasionally 
visiting the Eskimos. 

From the time Harrison left me at Shingle Point till 
the freeze-up several weeks later, we had visitors nearly 
every day. Some of them stayed with us a few days; 
others would arrive in the morning and leave towards 
evening, or arrive in the evening and leave in the morn- 
ing. This brought to my notice the remarkable ability 
of Eskimo children to stay awake for long periods. 

In the summer time with perpetual daylight, the sleep- 
ing habits of every one in the North are as irregular as 
can be. At Macpherson, and in the interior generally, 
it is common to go to sleep in the morning and get up 



76 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

in the evening. This is because the days are extremely 
hot and outdoors work is much more pleasant in the 
slightly cooler night hours. On the coast, however, the 
days are never unpleasantly hot, so we had no motive 
for going to sleep in the morning, and went to sleep 
instead whenever we liked. With the southern idea that 
there is a certain merit in regularity I used to try to 
sleep eight hours a day, but soon gave that up and fell 
into the native way of sleeping when I felt like it, some- 
times for an hour, sometimes for five hours and some- 
times for ten. Not infrequently I would sleep for five 
hours to be awakened by the announcement that there 
was something especially good to eat, whereupon I would 
join the others in the eating and then go to sleep again. 
All this is ordinary custom and perfectly good manners 
among the Eskimos. 

If the sleeping of the grown people is irregular, that 
of the children is still more so. This is especially the 
case because of the arrival and departure of visitors. 
All the Eskimos for hundreds of miles around knew each 
other well enough so that when a boat arrived there 
always came with it children that were at least familiar 
by name to some of the children that were in our camp. 
There would be great rejoicing and great excitement. 
Before this had time to quiet down some family would 
leave or perhaps another family would arrive, bringing 
the further excitement of parting with old playmates or 
greeting new ones. One of the Eskimo mothers told me 
in this connection that her eight-year-old daughter had 
been awake continuously for five days and nights, play- 
ing all the time. This interested me so much that I 
inquired from a number of other people in the village 
as well as from Sten, and ascertained with reasonable 



LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO 77 

certainty that several of the children had been awake 
continuously from three to five days. I have never since 
been at a village similarly situated, but I have frequently 
known Eskimos, both older people and youngsters, to 
stay awake as long as two and three days. Indeed, I 
am so used to doing this myself that I am not likely 
even to note it in my diaries. 

One day a boat came from the west bringing us news 
of importance. The whaling ship Narwhal had arrived 
at Herschel Island with messages from the Duchess of 
Bedford. This news had been so ill understood by the 
Eskimos that I became very anxious to go to Herschel 
Island to learn the whole truth. The Eskimos said the 
Narwhal had gone off on a short whaling cruise but 
would probably be back at Herschel Island harbor by 
now. It was said she did not have any considerable 
amount of trade goods, but I thought I should be able 
to buy from her some flour and other groceries. It was 
accordingly arranged that I should take Sten's whale- 
boat and make a trip in it to Herschel Island to get for 
him and me jointly a boatload of supplies. Roxy and 
Oblutok, my companions of the summer journey from 
Macpherson to Herschel, decided they would go with me, 
Mrs. Roxy coming along too. We sailed for Herschel 
Island and got there without incident. 



CHAPTER VII 

HOW AN ESKIMO SAILED THROUGH THE STORM 

At Herschel Island we found the Narwhal and on board 
of her the warmest sort of welcome from Captain George 
Leavitt and from his officers and men. The Captain told 
me that his ship and all the others, including Captain 
Amundsen's Gjoa, had reached Point Barrow without 
much trouble. From this point all the other ships con- 
tinued west to the Pacific and south to San Francisco. 
But as Captain Leavitt found himself able to half-stock 
his ship with provisions for another winter, he decided 
to come back to Herschel Island, for doing so would 
give him a fine chance to catch a lot of whales next 
spring. He had hitherto been compelled to compete with 
twelve and fifteen ships but now he could have the whole 
western Arctic to himself at the price of merely the 
slight hardship of wintering with a less variety of sup- 
plies than he was used to. He would have to put his 
men on rations, but felt no doubt of getting through the 
winter all right, especially as he hoped to engage a num- 
ber of Eskimo hunters to go south into the mountains 
and secure for him a large amount of caribou meat. 

Captain Leavitt's news of the Duchess of Bedford was 
that she had rounded Point Barrow safely. She had 
started east ahead of the Narwhal, but coming east the 
Narwhal had passed her somewhere without seeing her 
(probably in a fog), and the Captain could not say where 
she would now be. He thought it unlikely that she would 
get through to us at Herschel Island, for the season was 

7.8 



HOW AN ESKIMO SAILED THROUGH STORM 79 

so late (September 23rd) that any ship going out into 
the ocean would run the danger of having ice form all 
around her, preventing her from getting back again to 
the safety of a harbor. The best guess was that the 
Duchess was wintering somewhere near Flaxman Island, 
about halfway between Herschel Island and Point Bar- 
row and two hundred miles west of Herschel Island. 

Captain Leavitt thought the thing for me to do was 
to spend the winter where I liked, waiting for news. 
Shortly after the freeze-up Eskimo sled travel up and 
down the coast would commence and it would not be 
more than a month or two until news would get to 
Herschel Island about any ship that was wintering be- 
tween there and Point Barrow. 

My main errand at Herschel was to buy on behalf of 
Sten and myself as much as I could of certain things, 
chiefly groceries. Captain Leavitt told me at once that 
he had nothing to spare of most articles but a little of 
some staples. Of what he had, he would give me as 
much as I wanted. 

I was at the police barracks on shore when our pur- 
chases were being loaded into the whaleboat. On coming 
down to the ship I noticed that one thing missing from 
the list I had requisitioned was a barrel of molasses. 
Captain Leavitt had gone off somewhere and I asked 
the Mate whether they were short of molasses. He said 
that on the contrary it was one thing they had in un- 
limited quantity, and he felt sure the Captain would not 
mind if he gave me a barrel of it. The barrel was, 
accordingly, put in the boat. It was not until many 
months later that I found out why Captain Leavitt had 
not given me the molasses in the first place. He had 
intended to do so, but had found that when the boat 



8o HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

was loaded with the rest of my purchases it already had 
as much cargo as it could safely carry. He had stopped 
the men at the last moment when they were about to 
lower the molasses barrel, saying that in case of a gale 
we were liable to be swamped through overloading. 

Not being much of a sailor myself and having full 
confidence in Roxy, who had a great reputation in that 
regard both with Eskimos and whalers, I did not even 
suspect we were already overloaded as we rowed ashore 
from the Narwhal a hundred yards to the beach where 
some Eskimo friends of Roxy's had in waiting for us 
two or three huge tubs filled with what is known as 
"blackskin." This is a favorite food not only of the 
Eskimos but of many northern white men. It consists 
of slabs of whale skin and attached a certain amount of 
blubber. The skin varies in thickness according to the 
age of the whale and according to the part of the body 
it has been taken from, but generally it is from one- 
sixth to one-third of an inch thick and there may be any- 
thing from half an inch to several inches of blubber at- 
tached. I do not know exactly how much each tub of 
blackskin weighed, but I estimated later that between it 
and the molasses we must have been nearly a thousand 
pounds overweight — carrying three thousand pounds in 
a boat that was not really seaworthy with much more than 
two thousand. 

We started September 26th. There was a light breeze 
when we sailed which carried us a few miles away from 
the harbor. Then it fell a dead calm and Kay Point 
to the east was still twelve or fifteen miles away, too far, 
we thought, for rowing. Accordingly, we put in at 
Flanders Point, which is the landward end of Herschel 
Island and a good fishing place. 



HOW AN ESKIMO SAILED THROUGH STORM 81 

The next morning Roxy awoke me, saying that there 
was a fair wind blowing but that the weather later in 
the day would probably be bad. To me it seemed rather 
bad already. There were periods of calm and between 
them squalls of strong wind with flurries of snow. Along 
the coast just east of us there were several harbors, 
and Roxy and I agreed that on so threatening a day we 
would not proceed beyond Kay Point, for on the thirty- 
five-mile stretch from there to Shingle Point there is no 
shelter or any possibility of landing in case of a gale. 

Had we jumped into the boat promptly on waking 
up, I think all might have gone well. The Eskimos were 
eating a breakfast of dried fish and whale blubber. Had 
I been a good Eskimo also, I should have shared that 
with tbem and we might have been on the road in a few 
minutes. Thinking, however, that we could not proceed 
beyond Kay Point in any case, I took an hour to fry a 
small piece of pork that Captain Leavitt had given me 
and made a meal of that. When we finally started the 
gusts of wind had become so strong that had we been 
wise we would not have started at all. 

Everything was plane sailing for a few miles. When 
we were about halfway to Kay Point, Mrs. Roxy sug- 
gested that we had better turn into shelter by Stokes 
Point, but Roxy answered that this would not be neces- 
sary for we would find shelter behind Kay Point. This 
seemed reasonable. We were sailing northeast straight 
before a southwest wind. At Kay Point we were going 
to round a corner of the coast, turning southeast. A 
southwest wind would then be blowing off the land, giving 
us quiet water to beach the boat. 

Before we got to Kay Point it was a real gale. In all 
his experience Roxy had never sailed this sea in such a 



82 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

high wind. He knew the bay to be shallow but did not 
know how shallow it was. He had never seen breakers 
on it, but now when we came to the vicinity of Kay 
Point we found ahead of us a long line of breakers 
stretching far to the northwest from the tip of the Point. 
We saw this so late that there was nothing for it but 
to run through the breakers. We thought the boat would 
not touch bottom for Roxy assured me the depth of 
water would not be less than ten feet. But there was 
danger of the boat filling and sinking. 

Roxy now lived up to all the things I had heard about 
him as a wonderful sailor. He had to sit low at the tiller 
to do the steering but his wife stood on a pile of bedding 
at the mast and chose the road, for she had more sea- 
craft than I. The line of breakers was perhaps not more 
than fifty yards wide and we were through them in a 
moment. But it was an exciting moment. 

Now the time had almost come to make a ninety 
degree turn to the right, and Roxy warned all of us to 
stand by as the sail came over. But the sail did not 
come over; for just as we rounded the cape the wind 
changed. Evidently it was blowing parallel to the hills, 
and when we turned the corner of the land we had also 
turned a corner of the wind. That meant that we had 
before us a straight and steep coastline thirty-five miles 
to Shingle Point and never a place to land, for we had 
based our supposition of shelter behind Kay Point on 
the theory that the wind would be blowing from the 
southwest when we got there, and now it was blowing 
from the northwest. 

There was only one other hope. The wrecked schooner, 
Bonanza, was lying up on the beach at King Point and 
behind her there ought to be shelter as behind a pier. 



HOW AN ESKIMO SAILED THROUGH STORM 83 

This thought encouraged us a good deal, for it meant 
that the run for our lives would be eighteen miles only 
instead of thirty-five. 

Just after starting out in the morning we had changed 
the large regular sail of the whaleboat for the smaller 
storm sail. Later we had close reefed this, and we were 
now running straight before the wind with the smallest 
sail possible. Every now and then we took water on 
both sides of our bow, and every now and then we took 
water on both sides of our stern. We had cleared a place 
in the middle of the boat to do some bailing and had to 
bail steadily. 

There were two kinds of trouble with our cargo. One 
was that certain goods which would soak up water were 
in the bottom of the boat. It was not possible, there- 
fore, to bail out all the water that' came in, for some 
soaked into the baggage. Another trouble was that we 
had certain bulky things on top of the load. Roxy and 
I agreed we ought to throw overboard about half the 
cargo, but we were every moment in such imminent 
danger of being swamped that we never dared try to shift 
the bulky and heavy things so as to get them overboard. 

It was a tense time as we approached King Point. We 
saw the masts of the Bonanza clearly all the time but 
for some reason her hull appeared and disappeared. At 
first we thought she had been moved away from the 
beach and was floating, lifted up and down by the waves. 
But when we got nearer we saw that the situation was 
entirely otherwise. She was still fast on the beach, but 
the water was so steadily breaking over her that she was 
for that reason hidden two-thirds of the time. Half a 
mile before we got abreast we had decided that there 
would be no shelter behind her, and when we ran by we 



84 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

saw the water pouring over her lee side like a great river 
over a precipice. What had been a peaceful little eddy 
behind a sort of pier when we sailed west, was now about 
as much of a shelter as a whirlpool under a waterfall. 

In the beginning of the gale it had been Oblutok's job 
to do the bailing, but shortly after we passed Kay Point 
he had become so paralyzed with fright as to be entirely 
useless. Mrs. Roxy was a better sailor than I and under- 
stood more clearly how to do what she was told, so it 
was she who stood by for any emergency help, while 
I took the job of bailing, which required no orders but 
only incessant work. 

From King Point to Shingle Point we felt each mile 
as if we should never stay afloat another mile. Roxy 
remarked that speculating upon so doleful a possibility 
was unwise, that when the choice was between cheerful- 
ness and gloom, good cheer was always to be preferred, 
and that the best way to keep your spirits up was to 
sing. I was too busy for singing and am not sure that 
I felt like it. Roxy tried first to sing various ragtime 
songs and hymns he had learned from whalers and mis- 
sionaries, but when he found I did not join in he said 
that he might as well then sing Eskimo songs which had 
more spirit to them. This also had the advantage of 
enabling his wife to join in. 

I have not described Shingle Point and I had never 
until now made for myself a complete mental picture of 
it. But with our lives depending on its shape and posi- 
tion, I was able to build up from various memories a 
diagram of it and of the safe harbor behind. Thousands 
of years ago there must have been here a high cape and 
no sandspit. Then in the lee of the cape the currents 
began to build up a finger of sand, pointing straight east 



HOW AN ESKIMO SAILED THROUGH STORM 85 

from the cape while the land runs southeast. This finger 
of sand had gradually lengthened and lengthened until 
now it was nearly two miles long with a good-sized tri- 
angular bay behind it. A quarter of a mile beyond the 
finger tip of this sandspit was a little island and between 
it and the spit was a channel about nine feet deep for 
a hundred yards of its width. 

The village, consisting of Sten's house, some old 
Eskimo houses, and some tents, stood at the landward 
end of the sandspit not far from the mainland cliff. 
The sandspit itself is here probably some eight or 
twelve feet above sea level, and Sten's house was twelve 
feet high on top of that. We were still several miles 
away when we began to see the top of Sten's house as 
we were again and again lifted to the crests of the waves. 
When we went down into the troughs between them, the 
house went out of sight. Not only that, but even the 
land along which we were running was occasionally 
hidden. We were about a quarter of a mile from the 
beach and the land was two or three hundred feet high. 
Even so, the waves between us and the land were fre- 
quently high enough to hide the cliff completely. 

When we came near the village we could see all the 
people outside, and among them Sten standing at the 
beach and waving to us. We could not hear what he 
was shouting but his signals meant clearly that we were 
to run the boat ashore right where he stood and he and 
the Eskimos would stand by and try to rescue us from 
the undertow of the surf. Roxy and I discussed this 
and decided that if we landed we would be sure to wreck 
the boat, that most or all of the cargo would be lost, 
and that the chances were that we should all be drowned. 
He pointed out we had already run more than thirty 



86 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

miles safely and suggested that we risk another two 
milesiand try for the end of the spit. The difficulty was 
that in rounding the spit into the shelter of the harbor 
we would come broadside to the sea and would probably 
sink. However, we would have land on both sides and 
a good chance of swimming or floating ashore, while there 
was at least a possibility that we might make it and save 
our cargo. 

Sten told us later that as he ran along the beach 
parallel to us, our boat was frequently out of sight, mast 
and all, in the trough between the towering waves, and 
that each time we disappeared he fully expected we 
would never rise again. Long before we got to the end 
of the sandspit we had left him and the Eskimos far 
behind although they did their best to keep up. We 
were going pretty fast, and then the running is never 
the best in the loose gravel on a beach. 

When we came to the end of the spit and had to turn 
we eased the sail over gently and all leaned to the wind- 
ward side of the boat to try to keep her on an even keel. 
It was rare luck that no big wave struck us just then 
and we barely rounded the point. We had everything 
ready, dropped the sail as we came to and got in two or 
three good pulls at the oars before our boat actually 
began to sink. By then we were in such shallow water 
that we saved complete sinking by jumping out, thus re- 
lieving the boat of our weight and giving her a little 
more freeboard. Three of the Eskimos got to the tip 
of the spit just at that moment and rushed into the water 
to meet us. Between us we almost carried the boat to 
the beach. 

Sten, who was a little fat, came puffing up just then 
and scolded us for not beaching the boat by the village 




Roxy and His Wife 



HOW AN ESKIMO SAILED THROUGH STORM 87 

and making sure of our lives even at the cost of losing 
the boat and her cargo. He admitted later, however, 
that we would not have been sure of our lives even had 
we made this attempt. Roxy always maintained that in 
addition to the other advantages of actually rounding 
the point in safety, we had by saving the boat escaped 
a whole winter of being told by Sten how valuable his 
boat had been and what a sacrifice it had been to him 
to encourage us to beach and smash it. Roxy's saying 
this was mainly Eskimo humor, for Sten really was a 
very generous man. 

For a landsman this was something of an adventure 
and, indeed, all the adventure I cared for in that line. 
It gave me one more reason to be glad when the freeze- 
up came a few days later to give us a safe bridge over 
what had previously been treacherous water. 

The Penelope might have been able to get into the 
harbor behind Shingle Point, although that is debatable 
as she drew about as much as the estimated depth of 
the channel. However that may be, Sten had not tried to 
take her into the harbor. Through the great gale that 
nearly drowned us she had ridden at anchor safely, al- 
though the people ashore had been in continual fear of 
her breaking loose. Now the freeze-up came unexpect- 
edly (October 2nd), and she was fast in the ice nearly 
half a mile from shore. This looked bad. But Sten and 
Roxy told of several instances. where ships had lain for 
a whole winter in such exposed situations safely. I had 
a friendly interest by now in her Eskimo owners, and 
a personal interest in the ship for she might carry me 
on some adventure next summer if our own Duchess 
failed to come. So I hoped the optimists were right and 
that the Penelope was safe in her berth in the ice. 



CHAPTER VIII 

AN AUTUMN JOURNEY THROUGH ARCTIC MOUNTAINS 

Shortly after the freeze-up Roxy repaired one of the 
old Eskimo houses for us to live in. It had been built 
of sod and earth over a frame of driftwood and the floor 
of it was about a foot lower than the ground outside. 
In April of the previous spring another Eskimo family 
had been living in this house. When the sun became 
warm the snow on the roof began to melt, causing drip- 
ping within doors. The family then moved out and when 
I first saw the house I looked in through a skylight upon 
a stagnant lake covering much of the floor. Now this 
had frozen into solid ice and we went in with axes, adzes 
and picks and hacked up the ice and a good deal of mud 
from the earth floor under the ice and shoveled the whole 
thing out. We then split a large number of driftwood 
logs, each along the middle, hewed the surfaces flat and 
thus made a floor over about three-quarters of the 
house, the flat sides of the split logs being up and the 
round sides resting on the ground. Had the house been 
intended for more permanent occupation, we should have 
made real planks by adzing both sides of the logs flat. 
That part of the earth floor not covered by logs was 
covered deep with a layer of chips so that the ice under- 
neath should not thaw, no matter how hot the interior 
of the house might become. Here was one of the many 
instances of the usefulness of frost. What had been 
sloppy and malodorous mud in the summer was now 

88 



AN AUTUMN JOURNEY 89 

odorless and almost as hard as concrete, making a sani- 
tary and pleasant foundation for our floor, whether for 
the planking or for the shavings and chips. 

Roxy told me that twenty years ago such a house 
would have been heated with a number of lamps burn- 
ing seal or whale oil. But we had instead a galvanized 
iron stove and lived much as prospectors and other 
pioneers do in the forests of the northwest — only our 
house stood on a sandspit running out into the sea and 
the land back of us was a rolling prairie stretching in 
higher and higher hills back towards the mountains one 
or two days' journey away. 

Not long after the freeze-up a party of Eskimos came 
from the interior to fetch the sledges and other belong- 
ings which they had left behind with us in September 
when they had journeyed inland, carrying their belong- 
ings on their own backs and on the backs of their dogs. 
Nothing heavy or bulky can readily be transported in 
that way. They had, therefore, left with us not only 
their sledges, but also their sheet-iron stoves and many 
other things they needed, among them spare ammuni- 
tion and the traps which they were going to use during 
the winter. 

The season for trapping had now almost arrived. On 
or near the arctic coast it is considered to begin about 
the middle of November and to last until early April. 
Our visitors reported that they had their winter homes 
just beyond the mountain range, and, as I understood, 
thirty or forty miles inland. They had killed a number 
of caribou and expected to kill some more. Half the 
hunters of that particular village were now at home hunt- 
ing while the rest had come down to fetch the sleds. 

Roxy and Sten became greatly interested in the stories 



go HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

of caribou hunting inland, and I think that I was more 
interested than either of them. Roxy was used to living 
on fish alone and did not mind it. And Sten had in his 
house a little flour and other provisions. When I pur- 
chased the groceries from Captain Leavitt in the fall, I 
had thought I was getting about half enough to live on 
all winter. This could easily have been eked out with 
fish to last the whole winter. To do that seemed rea- 
sonable at first, but when we actually got the goods 
ashore at Shingle Point both Roxy and Sten explained 
to me that nothing could be saved or rationed which was 
kept in the house of an Eskimo. They were communists 
and, furthermore, great believers in the doctrine that 
sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof and that the 
morrow is well able to take care of itself. The only way 
I could save the groceries would be to keep them in Sten's 
house. The Eskimos understood the peculiar prejudice 
the white men have for private property and would not 
mind it at all if white men had in their own homes any 
delectable things unobtainable by Eskimos. But any- 
thing left in the home of an Eskimo would be eaten up 
just as quickly as suited all the Eskimos. Roxy ex- 
plained that I would never be able to make friends with 
the people if I lived among them and still tried to have 
my own food in private. I would either have to go and 
live with Sten on groceries or else live with them on fish. 
I had, accordingly, given Sten all my groceries. Oc- 
casionally, however, I got back from him five or ten 
pounds of flour and we had in Roxy's house a little feast 
of doughnuts shared by all. These doughnut banquets 
had been less than a tenth of my diet and I was hungry 
for a change from the fish that had been nine-tenths of 
the diet. I was no less eager to see the country inland 



AN AUTUMN JOURNEY $1) 

and to learn how the caribou-hunting Eskimos lived. 
This suited all parties. Roxy would go inland with his 
own dog team to fetch caribou meat and I would accom- 
pany him with Sten's dogs. 

We started October 18th, Roxy and I each with a 
team and the other hunters with four teams. A boy 
of about eighteen, named Sitsak, accompanied Roxy. As 
a favor which we expected them to repay later in deer 
meat, we helped them carry their gear. This sharing 
of the loads made all our sledges light. 

We traveled slowly, however, and for many reasons. 
One was that we were in no hurry and there was much 
to talk about. We enjoyed the camp life, sat up joking 
and telling stories till after midnight, and slept till the 
middle of the day. The days, too, were exceedingly 
short. When they were cloudy there were not more than 
four or five hours of traveling light. For another thing, 
the snow was not deep and, as we came into the moun- 
tains, the ground became rockier, necessitating many 
detours. Even the light sledges dragged heavily when 
the runners cut through the snow to the ground or rock 
beneath. Then we seemed to be traveling a sort of 
diagonal course across valleys. We did not follow any 
one valley for long but would leave it and climb over a 
steep ridge, descending sometimes with considerable dif- 
ficulty into the next valley. Altogether, it took us five 
days to climb to the crest of the mountains, although I 
do not think the distance can have been over thirty 
miles. Beyond that it was down hill and easier. 

On the way up the mountains we traveled at first 
through a river valley that had clumps of willows here 
and there five or eight feet high. As we climbed higher 
we saw continually fewer willows standing, but my com- 



92 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

panions knew exactly where to look on the gravel bars 
in the river bed to pick up little willow roots and stems 
that had been left there as driftwood by the high water 
of last spring. This gave us enough to burn. 

One day it was anticipated that the evening's camp 
site would be nearly destitute of fuel, and that day we 
kept watch as we traveled across the gravel bars, pick- 
ing up here and there a little piece of stick and thrust- 
ing it under the rope lashings that held the loads in place 
on our sleds. The crest of the mountains was, of course, 
bare of any willows big enough to show above the snow. 
But going down we soon came to bushes, for we were 
now on the southward slope where the heat of the sun 
in summer is more effective. It was about five or eight 
miles till we got into willows that were higher than a 
man's head and presently we came to the homes of our 
caribou-hunting friends. 

Nowadays the Mackenzie Eskimos purchase from the 
whalers and traders tents of the ordinary white men's 
style. In the old days there used to be two kinds of 
Eskimo tents. The Mackenzie River people preferred 
conical shapes, much like the Indian wigwams you see 
in pictures; the Alaska Eskimos generally had hemi- 
spherical tents. The framework of these reminds one 
very much of a round basket lying bottom side up — 
except, of course, that the bent willows which form the 
frame of the tent are not a fraction of an inch apart, as 
they would be in a basket, but two or three feet apart. 
Over this frame they nowadays throw a canvas covering. 
In the old days this covering was made of skins, com- 
monly caribou. Even now caribou skins are sometimes 
used for winter tents, for they are much warmer than 
canvas. 



AN AUTUMN JOURNEY 93 

The village at which we had arrived was made of houses 
built on the general plan of the dome tent. First they 
had made a hemispherical framework of pliant willows 
with a floor space perhaps ten feet across, and a dome- 
shaped roof, so high that a tall man could stand erect 
in the center. Sometimes the height of the house was de- 
termined by the height of the man that built it. One of 
our hosts, Ningaksik, was about six feet tall and his house 
was the loftiest. 

When the preliminary framework had been made of 
strong willows, they had woven in among them smaller 
willows until the frame really resembled a basket. Into 
the spaces between the willows they had then stuffed 
wads of moss and over them had been laid a layer of 
moss. On top of the whole had been sifted soft snow. 
This made a house so warm that, although there was 
fairly good ventilation through a pipe in the roof, it was 
still not necessary to do any more than barely keep 
a fire in the stove to maintain the house at as high 
a temperature as we consider comfortable in American 
houses. When cooking was going on, the houses became 
uncomfortable to me from the heat, although the Eskimos 
did not mind it. In general the Mackenzie River and 
Alaska Eskimos keep their winter houses anything from 
ten to twenty degrees warmer than the typical steam- 
heated houses of our cities. 

There were only three real houses in this village, for 
two of the families were still living in tents. Up to our 
arrival they had been using fireplaces but now all but one 
of them installed stoves which we had brought from the 
coast. I found especial interest in watching the cooking 
in the house where they still used a fireplace. There was 
nothing in the way of a chimney nor was the fireplace at 



94 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

the side, as our pioneers used to have them. Instead, the 
fire is built in the middle of the floor. The fireplace is 
made of huge stones, not to hold in the fire nor yet to 
rest the pots on, but merely for the purpose of absorbing 
heat from the fire so that the stones shall give it out 
slowly after the fire has died. When the cooking is about 
to begin, the fireplace is filled with specially inflammable 
material — dry bark, twigs with resin on them, and the 
like. Directly above the fireplace is a square opening in 
the roof covered by deer skin parchment or some other 
translucent material. This skylight is the main window 
of the house. 

Just before the fire is lighted the window covering is 
removed and when the match is applied the flames rise 
almost to the roof of the house. This conflagration is for 
the purpose of creating a draft suddenly and thus prevent- 
ing any smoke from spreading through the house. While 
the fire is going a crevice is kept open at the bottom of the 
door on a level with the ground. In some houses there 
is a second opening along the ground just opposite to the 
door, and I have heard of houses that had still two more 
openings, these at right angles to the first two. Through 
these apertures the fresh air enters to supply the strong 
current that rises through the skylight, thus keeping the 
house free of smoke. 

When the cooking is finished the fire is allowed to die 
down until there are only a few coals left. By that time 
the great boulders around the fireplace have become hot. 
The last coals are gathered in a pan, carried outdoors and 
thrown away, so that there shall be no smoke in the house 
when the parchment is again put over the skylight. 

I have found by actual experience that even on a very 
cold day the stones of the fireplace will usually retain 



AN AUTUMN JOURNEY 95 

enough heat so that a fire every six hours is ample to keep 
the house comfortable. The cooking of the three regular 
meals a day ; therefore, gives enough incidental heat to 
last until nearly midnight when people go to sleep. Like 
us, the Eskimos prefer to have their houses cooler at night 
than in the daytime, and houses of the inland type may 
get almost cold. I do not, however, recall ever having 
been in one where it froze even towards morning. 

On our way over the mountains Roxy and I had talked 
about spending a week or two at the caribou camp hunt- 
ing, but the weather continued unpropitious. It was 
foggy or snowing nearly every day and there was con- 
sequently little chance of finding game. The hunters 
who had been at the camp all the time said also that for 
the last two or three weeks caribou had been very scarce. 
Just ahead was the period of mid-winter darkness when 
hunting is difficult, and the meat already in camp was, 
therefore, precious. Between us, Roxy and I had fifteen 
dogs. On the coast, where fish by the ton were piled 
up under heaps of driftwood, feeding the dogs did not 
make noticeable inroads into the winter provisions. But 
here in the mountain camp we could daily see the little 
store of caribou meat growing smaller. 

It is always one of the most difficult problems of the 
caribou-hunting Eskimos to decide how many dogs to 
keep. You must have enough to follow the herds around 
and to fetch home the meat of the animals that have been 
killed. On the other hand, if you have too many they will 
eat you out of house and home. In the present case there 
was no lack of hospitality on the part of our hosts and 
they urged us to stay till the weather became better so 
we could do some hunting, but Roxy finally decided that 
doing so would be unfair to our hosts and even unsafe, for 



96 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

our dogs were eating the meat that might be needed to 
keep our hosts from shortage during the absence of the 
sun when hunting is difficult. Accordingly, we loaded up 
our sledges with the meat we had come to fetch and 
started for the coast. 

The journey back was on the whole no more difficult 
than coming south had been. Our sledges were now 
loaded where they had been light, but there was more 
snow on the ground and the going was better. Also it 
was down hill most of the time. Coming up we had cut 
across the river courses a good deal, scrambling up and 
down steep places. Going back we took a longer way, 
following the windings of a river that comes out about 
five miles east of Shingle Point. 

On the way down the river Roxy walked ahead of the 
leading sled with an ice spear which had been made by 
fastening a big file at the end of a staff seven or eight 
feet long and then sharpening the point of the file. He 
jabbed this through the snow into the ice ahead of him, 
raising the spear methodically and bringing it down again 
every three or four steps. Evidently he was testing the 
ice to see if it was strong enough to bear us. At first 
this appeared ridiculous, for we had now had continuous 
frosts for more than a month and the temperature was 
twenty or thirty degrees below zero. But, like everything 
else, the explanation of the danger was simple when you 
once understood it. 

Roxy explained the situation to me in detail. Early in 
the fall while the river is still open the falling snow melts 
in the running water and disappears. Later you may 
have a sharp frost for two or three days when there is 
no snow falling, and ice two or three inches thick or 
even a foot thick may form on the river. Then comes a 



AN AUTUMN JOURNEY 97 

heavy fall of snow, blanketing the ice with a foot or more 
of light flakes. This snow blanket keeps the winter cold 
away from the river ice better than an eiderdown quilt 
or a fur robe. It now makes little difference how cold 
the air is above the snow, if the water running under the 
ice is a little bit above the freezing point. If that is the 
case, the current will gradually eat away the ice that was 
formed until there remains only a scum of ice to support 
the snow above it. In some cases even this scum of ice 
is eaten away by the current and then the snow drops 
down into the open water, leaving a gaping hole which 
can be seen from a distance and which can, therefore, be 
avoided. However, when an actual hole appears the frost 
gets another chance, so that it will not be many hours 
until clear ice perfectly safe to walk upon forms over 
that particular patch. The danger places, therefore, are 
not where any danger sign is visible, but where the snow 
in front of you lies white and apparently safe. 

In later years of travel in the North I have heard story 
after story of the most experienced Indians being drowned 
in the northern rivers and in those northern lakes where 
there are currents. In big lakes, such as Great Bear or 
Great Slave, strong currents are occasionally developed, 
possibly through tidal influence. Far from shore these 
are not dangerous, but in the vicinity of a point of land 
the traveler on the northern lakes should be exceedingly 
careful. Though the ice of Great Bear Lake, for instance, 
may be ten feet thick in places, there are other places 
where men and sleds will disappear suddenly through the 
snow because the ice that formed before the snow fell 
has since been eaten away. This is a type of danger to 
which the Eskimos are far less exposed than the Indians, 
for the Eskimos mainly keep to the seacoast. When 



98 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

they are on the inland rivers they appear to be on the 
average more careful than the Indians. 

On our river there was little danger of drowning, for 
it was shallow, but there was the danger of getting your 
feet wet, not only in the way I have described but also 
in another way that is more common and more difficult 
to avoid. A shallow river will quickly freeze to the bot- 
tom in some rapid. The water above the frozen place 
will then be held back until finally it will burst through 
the ice somewhere above the obstruction and flood the 
surface. Now there are places where snowdrifts lie clean 
across the river in ridges, forming obstructions that dam 
the water back so that you may have ten or even fifteen 
inches of water on top of the previous ice. If this flooding 
has taken place only a few hours before you come to that 
stretch of the river, there are only two courses open. 
Either you must scramble up into the hillside and travel 
parallel to the river till you get below the flooded place, 
or else you must camp and wait till the surface water 
has frozen over. In winter this is seldom a long wait. 
The general rule is that if you come to a bad place in the 
forenoon you try to get around it, but if you come to one 
in the afternoon you camp over night and expect the ice 
to carry you next morning. 

On the last day of our homeward journey we were in 
a hurry so as not to have to make camp. We had made 
up our minds to sleep that night at Shingle Point. For 
that reason we took more risk than ordinary, traveling 
over thin flood ice. We all broke through several times. 
Roxy, being ahead, was the first to break through and I 
saw how he jumped instantly out of the water into a deep 
snowbank and rubbed the snow all over his wet feet. 
This was because dry snow at low temperatures acts like 



AN AUTUMN JOURNEY 99 

the best kind of blotter, soaking up all moisture. If you 
have on several thicknesses of woolen socks, for instance, 
you may slip to your ankle into water and get your foot 
out of the water into the snow so quickly that this blotter 
sucks the moisture out before it gets through all the dif- 
ferent layers in to your skin. If you know in advance 
you are going to get into the water anyway, it is a fine 
idea to go to some place where you can stand firmly on 
one foot while you stick the other quickly into water 
and then into a snowbank. This will form a coating of 
frost in your outer stockings which will later on be water- 
proof and keep out further wettings almost as well as a 
rubber boot. 

The Eskimos make admirable water boots out of seal 
skin. These are always used in summer, but in winter 
they are too cold and are put on only when you know for 
certain that you are going to have a good deal of wading 
during the day. This day we had not put on our water- 
proofs and, as I was inexpert in waterproofing my foot- 
gear by dampening and freezing it, I got wet through my 
deer skin boots and socks. That evening when we got 
home and when I removed my footgear, I found that my 
heel was frozen slightly. Since then I have spent ten 
winters in the North and this is the only time that I have 
had a foot even touched by frost. I have already given 
part of the reason — my inexperience. Another part was 
that we were still wearing autumn clothing and were not 
as admirably prepared for meeting the cold as we would 
have been had the journey been made a month later. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE SUN GOES AWAY FOR THE WINTER 

A newcomer in the Arctic spends much time watching 
the sun as it sinks lower and lower each day until at 
last it ceases to appear above the horizon and the "Long 
Night" begins. With us, the sun disappeared behind the 
mountains to the south about the middle of November. 

Towards Christmas I became dissatisfied with my stay 
at Shingle Point, but for no other reason than that the 
Eskimos there were too sophisticated. Roxy, for instance, 
had worked on whaling ships for more than twenty years 
and spoke English fluently although it was, of course, the 
kind of broken English which whalers and traders always 
use in dealing with Indians or Eskimos. If the white 
men who come in contact with the Eskimos would only 
speak good English to them, the Eskimos would have 
some chance of learning good English. This is never the 
case, however, except in those parts of Alaska where 
Government schools have been established or in some 
part of Canada where a missionary maintains a school. 
The captain who is talking to an Eskimo will never say, 
"He traveled rapidly." Instead he says "Him go plenty 
quick," or something of that sort. This, then, was the 
kind of English that Roxy spoke and he used it in our 
dealings continually. 

The rest of Roxy's family were his wife, his adopted 
son about fourteen years old, and adopted daughter 
(whom I have called his daughter) aged ten. By the 
time winter actually set in, all our fellow villagers of the 

IOO 



THE SUN GOES AWAY FOR THE WINTER 101 

autumn had moved away except the same bearded Ob- 
lutok whom I have described, his wife, daughter and son- 
in-law, Sitsak. None of these spoke English to any extent 
but they used instead a sort of "pidgin" which has grown 
up among the Eskimos for a peculiar reason. 

There are probably few languages in the world more 
difficult to learn than Eskimo. If you want to get along 
well, you have to use every day a vocabulary of ten or 
twelve thousand words. This is a vocabulary three or 
four times as large as that used by the average European 
when speaking a European language. In addition, the 
inflections are so complicated that Greek or German would 
be easy in comparison. The white men who come in con- 
tact with the Eskimos are ordinarily not of the scholarly 
type. They may try when first they come to the country 
to learn Eskimo but they soon give it up as being hope- 
lessly difficult and drop into the general habit of using 
"jargon" or "pidgin." 

This jargon itself has been developed because of the 
difficulty of learning the real language. It is an artificial 
tongue, comparable to the pidgin English that is used by 
Europeans in dealing with Chinamen. The Mackenzie 
River jargon consists of three or four hundred words, 
according to which whaler or which Eskimo you talk 
with. In addition to the regular jargon nearly every in- 
dividual invents a few special words of his own which 
are known to him and those he deals with. Where the 
real Eskimo is highly inflected, this jargon is not inflected 
at all. 

It is a curious thing that many white men, even those 
who have lived for long periods with the Eskimos, have 
mistaken the jargon for the real Eskimo language. Ex- 
amples of that were all the police who were in the vicinity 



102 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

of Herschel Island during my first year. These police- 
men had come to the country only a year or two before 
and had found the jargon in daily use between Eskimos 
and white men (such white men, for instance, as Cap- 
tain Klinkonberg) who had been married to Eskimo 
women so long that they had large families already partly 
grown. I think Klinkenberg's oldest daughter was about 
twelve or fourteen when I heard him talking to his wife 
fluently in some language I did not understand. I wrote 
in my diary at the time that he talked with her in Es- 
kimo. The same had been the impression of the police 
when they came to the country. Then month by month 
they had learned this language which the whalers were 
talking to the Eskimos until they knew nearly or quite 
every word of it and could speak it as fluently as the 
whalers. They then thought they could speak Eskimo, 
and when I came they told me so. 

Constable Walker gave me a three-hundred-word vo- 
cabulary of what he considered pure Eskimo. I found 
out later that the stems of about ten of the words came 
from the languages of the South Sea Islands. These were 
apparently words used by the whalers in talking with 
Hawaiians and later incorporated by them into the speech 
they used with the Eskimos. There were a few words de- 
rived from Spanish and from English, as in the case of 
the phrase "me savvy" where the "me" comes from Eng- 
lish and the "savvy" from Spanish by way of southern 
California where some of the whalers had lived. Other 
whalers had been in Greenland waters before they came to 
Herschel Island and had brought with them Greenland 
jargon words which came ultimately from the Danish — 
such as "coonie" (so written by Constable Walker when 
he gave me his vocabulary) . Although I can read Danish, 



THE SUN GOES AWAY FOR THE WINTER 103 

I did not at the time recognize this word as the Danish 
word kona, meaning woman. In the Herschel Island 
jargon it is used to mean either woman or wife. 

It did not take me long to find out that the jargon was 
not the real Eskimo, for I had brought with me an ex- 
cellent grammar of Greenland Eskimo made by a German 
scholar who had lived nearly all his life in Greenland. I 
used to beg Roxy and the rest of the people to talk to me 
in real Eskimo and they would sometimes do it for a 
while, but they always relapsed, Roxy into the broken 
English and the others into the jargon which they spoke 
to Sten and which they had been using with the white 
men since 1889. Indeed, there had been a similar jargon 
in use between the Eskimos and the Indians to the south 
of them even before the whites came, so that the habit 
of talking pidgin to any kind of foreigner was ingrained 
in all the Mackenzie Eskimos. 

I understood from Roxy, however, that the people who 
lived to the east of the Mackenzie delta were far less 
sophisticated. One peculiar thing Roxy told me about 
his cousin Ovayuak (whom Mr. Firth had recommended 
to me as the best of all the Eskimos) was that he was 
proud of the Eskimo ways and Eskimo tongue and did 
his best to keep them pure. This Roxy considered an 
amiable eccentricity, but he understood that the eccen- 
tricity would serve my purpose, so he suggested that if 
I wanted to learn real Eskimo and find out as nearly as 
possible what the Eskimos were like before the white 
men came, I had better go to visit Ovayuak. The idea 
struck me favorably at once. It had the further advan- 
tage of bringing me near to Harrison's camp, and being 
a little lonesome I thought of the possibility of spending 
Christmas with him. 



104 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

Roxy now agreed that he and Sitsak would take me to 
Tuktuyaktok, the place where Ovayuak lived, a journey 
of about a hundred and fifty miles by the devious chan- 
nels between the islands, although no more than half of 
that as the crow flies. The arrangement was that when 
we got there I should purchase from Ovayuak a chest 
of Hudson's Bay Company's tea and a Hudson's Bay 
Company's four-point blanket to pay him for the trip. 
He insisted that these things and none other should be 
the pay for the journey and through his insistence I 
learned one more way in which the Eskimos are similar 
to ourselves. 

Before the whalers came to Herschel Island, the Es- 
kimos had been in the habit of purchasing from the Hud- 
son's Bay Company four or five main items — tobacco, 
tea, guns and ammunition, traps and cloths of various 
kinds — silk, velvet, canvas, blankets, etc. For all of 
these they had to pay fabulous prices because the Com- 
pany's difficulty in getting goods to Fort Macpherson 
overland was great, and of course the trade of the country 
was small. That there was in the early days no competi- 
tion may have had something to do also with keeping up 
the price. 

When the whalers came to Herschel Island in 1889 
they were so eager to get fresh meat and fresh fish from 
the Eskimos (things for which there had been no sale 
until then) that they heaped upon the Eskimos far more 
than they knew what to do with of all the different things 
the Hudson's Bay Company had been in the habit of 
selling them, and a great many other things besides. 
Now the whaler goods differed from the Hudson's Bay 
Company's goods. The eagerness of the whalers to ex- 
change their wares for things which had previously had 



THE SUN GOES AWAY FOR THE WINTER 105 

no market value gave the Eskimos the impression that 
the whaler goods must be inferior in quality. In some 
cases this may really have been true, as with the velvets, 
blankets, etc. But in other cases the opposite was ob- 
viously true. Take, for instance, shotguns. The whaling 
officers frequently brought in double-barreled guns of 
Greener and other well-known English types. These they 
used to present to the Eskimos in return for special favors 
or as mere acts of friendliness. In other cases they sold 
them to the Eskimos for small quantities of fresh meat. 
The Hudson's Bay Company had been bringing in only 
single- or double-barreled muzzle loaders. In the world 
markets the muzzle loaders would probably have cost 
less than ten dollars each while the breech loaders of the 
whalers were in some cases worth over a hundred dollars. 

But the Hudson's Bay Company had never given away 
any muzzle loaders and had instead insisted on a fabulous 
price for them. The impression then grew up among 
the Eskimos that the muzzle loaders were much better 
guns than the breech loaders. When I tried to argue 
them out of this, it was like trying to convince a woman 
that silk and lace are less valuable than woolens because 
they give less warmth and wear out more easily. The 
Eskimos I met said to me quite plainly: "It is true that 
the breech loaders shoot as well and are much more con- 
venient." "But," they added, "they are, nevertheless, 
inferior guns" — just as women might admit that a lace 
gown is neither strong nor warm but is, nevertheless, a 
better dress than a stronger, warmer one made out of a 
cheap fabric. 

For a similar reason Roxy wanted Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany's tea. I knew the price of that tea in Winnipeg to 
be eighteen cents a pound and I knew that some of the 



106 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

tea we had at Shingle Point would have cost in Winnipeg 
at least forty cents a pound. However, the forty-cent 
tea was whaler tea which the Eskimos were accustomed 
to get cheaply, while the Hudson's Bay Company's tea 
had never been sold for less than two dollars a pound. 
The Mackenzie Eskimos, accordingly, considered Hud- 
son's Bay tea as the only tea any man would drink who 
could afford it. 

I readily promised Roxy the tea and blanket, for I 
thought I would be able to secure them from the Hudson's 
Bay Company's goods which Ovayuak was selling as their 
agent. Later Roxy made a second condition, that I was 
to buy from Sten two good dogs and lend them to him to 
use along with his own team on the way east. When we 
got to Ovayuak's I would keep those dogs there and he 
and Sitsak would return to Shingle Point with the dimin- 
ished team. 



CHAPTER X 

LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA 

, We started on December first. This was my initial 
winter journey and on it I learned a good many things 
about winter travel. The first was how to dress. In 
this I had been well coached both by Roxy and by Sten, 
and the women had made me up a suitable outfit of 
clothing. 

The ideal clothing for winter travel is made entirely of 
caribou skin. We speak of it as being tanned because 
we have no better word, but really it is not tanned at 
all — only scraped. 

When I lived among the Dogrib and Yellowknife In- 
dians of Great Bear Lake (1910-11), I found they had 
an elaborate system of tanning. First they dried the skin 
thoroughly, next they rubbed all over the surface a paste 
made out of decayed caribou liver or decayed caribou 
brains. Then they rolled the hide up and allowed it to 
remain for a day or two. This was only one of several 
processes through which they put the skin. At the end 
it was soft, had a yellowish color on the flesh side, and 
a pungent odor. The entire process took a week or more. 

A Mackenzie Eskimo woman gets better results with 
one-fifth of the labor and in one-tenth of the time. She 
just scrapes the skin with a blunt scraper, then dampens 
it, dries it, and scrapes it a second time. This makes the 
skin if anything softer than the Indian tan, a beautiful 
pure white on the flesh side and without any odor. Fur- 
thermore, the Indian process fills the pores of the skin 

107 



108 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

with some material which stiffens on freezing, so that 
even though the Indian tanned skin may be just as soft 
as the Eskimo tanned in a warm room, it will be appre- 
ciably stiffer out of doors. 

The Eskimo "tanning" also makes the skin exceedingly 
light so that a complete set of winter garments weighs 
rather less than the average man's business suit in winter 
in such places as New York or London. The best suit 
I ever had weighed a little less than ten pounds, and that 
included every stitch I had on from my toes to the top 
of my head. 

Our winter undergarments have the fur in all the way 
from socks to mittens. You may think this would tickle, 
but it does not any more than a sealskin collar tickles 
your cheek. We arrange our clothes so that we seldom 
perspire even with fairly violent exercise, but if they do 
get damp, they dry much more quickly than woolen gar- 
ments. The outer clothes have the fur out everywhere 
except the palms of the outer mittens and the soles of 
the boots. 

Both the undershirt and the coat that goes over it have 
a hood which covers the head so as to protect the ears 
but leaves the cheeks and forehead exposed. I have 
known white men who wore knitted woolen caps inside 
the hood and I think if I were bald I might do the same. 
For a man who is not bald (and Eskimos seldom are) 
using a knitted cap is no advantage. I used to think it 
would be better to have the hood come far forward, some- 
thing like a sunbonnet, so as to shelter the nose and cheeks 
from a cold wind. I have found this the opposite of an 
advantage, for your breath catches in the hood if it sticks 
too fai forward and forms a mass of ice that rubs against 
youi cheek and eventually freezes you. 



LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA 109 

Regulation of temperature is obtained by adjusting 
your belt. Both the shirt and outer coat are made so 
that they hang loosely outside of the trousers and come 
down halfway to the knee. If the day is, say, around 
zero or 20 below, you would very likely wear nothing 
but your shirt (or, as we frequently call it, undercoat) 
hanging loose like a cloak. If that proves chilly, you put 
on a belt which keeps the warmth in a bit more. If you 
begin to perspire, you take off your belt again. If it is 
still too warm, you open up the neck of the shirt a little 
under the chin and allow a cold current of air to circulate 
up around your body and come out at your neck. When 
you are overheated this feels very pleasant, and if it be- 
gins to feel unpleasantly cool you tighten up the neck 
of your undercoat again. 

If the undercoat with a belt is not warm enough, you 
put on over it the outer coat, which you have been carry- 
ing on top of the sled. The two coats with the belt on 
the undercoat may now be too warm so you remove the 
belt. If it is extremely cold, you take the belt off the 
inner and put it outside the outer coat so as to hold both 
of them against you. 

With the trousers the same general principles apply 
except that I have found it even better than two pairs of 
fur trousers to have the inner trousers of fur and over 
them several pairs of light outer trousers made Chinese- 
fashion of some thin cloth, such as drilling. You would 
carry three or four pairs of them on top of the sled. If 
the single under trousers are not enough, you put on 
one pair of loose drill trousers over them. If that is not 
enough, you put on a second pair, and if that is not 
enough still a third, and so on till you have enough. 
When it gets warmer you take them off one by one and 



no HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

put them on top of the sled to be ready for the next 
emergency. 

These are ideal clothes to use in winter in such places 
as Russia, the Adirondack^, Minnesota, or Montana, and 
generally everywhere in Canada except on the Pacific 
Coast. Or, rather, they would be ideal if people knew 
how to take care of them, but that is a delicate matter. 
Should they become damp you must not hang them up 
near a stove, for in that case they would not last you 
many weeks. The same heat that would not affect our 
ordinary "civilized" furs at all will spoil caribou skin 
clothes. If they become damp they shrink when they 
dry, but a little scraping makes them soft again. There 
are many other tricks of taking care of caribou skin 
clothes after they get wet or when something goes 
wrong. 

But the main thing is to see that nothing does go wrong. 
To begin with, you should not let them get damp. Be- 
fore going North, I had read some polar books and had 
learned how the arctic explorers suffered from wet cloth- 
ing. Hoar frost would gather in them in the day time. 
This cannot be prevented, for even when you are not 
perspiring there is a certain amount of invisible vapor 
coming out all over your body. I found on this winter 
journey across the Mackenzie delta that on a calm morn- 
ing if I held my bare hand in front of me there would 
be columns of steam rising from every finger although 
the hand appeared perfectly dry. This steam is always 
rising from the body no matter what the temperature, and 
indeed it rises the more rapidly the warmer the tempera- 
ture. But it is not visible to the human eye except when 
it is condensed into a kind of fog by a temperature of 
thirty or forty below zero. It is this ordinarily invisible 



LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA in 

vapor that the explorers tell about condensing in their 
clothing and making them damp. 

When the explorers I had read about came into camp 
in the evening, there was a little rime along every seam, 
and perhaps in other parts of their clothes. As the camp 
became warm this melted and made the clothes damp. 
They did not dry over night. Next day more rime gath- 
ered and next night they became more wet. Some ex- 
plorers have described how their clothes became soaking 
wet in a week or two of travel. They would sleep at night 
with everything on inside the sleeping bags. The frost 
in the garments then melted and the explorers slept in a 
cold bath all night. Next morning when they got up they 
would have to take hold of their sleeves with their fingers 
to keep them tight while they were freezing, so that they 
should not wrinkle up and leave the wrist bare. The 
sleeves were now as stiff as boards. One explorer tells 
how his sleeves were so hard that the edge of one cut a 
gash into his wrist just above the thumb so deep that the 
scar remained for years after. 

With all this book knowledge in my head, I was a good 
deal worried setting out on my first trip with Roxy, but 
he explained to me how all these troubles could be easily 
avoided. On this particular trip we would have a stove 
and a roaring fire every night, so wet things could be 
dried. However, the trick was to take off before going 
into camp the garments with hoar frost in them. If you 
are wearing only one coat the hoar frost will not gather 
inside of it because of the warmth of your body, and it is 
found only on the outside. This is the smooth skin side 
and you can scrape the rime off with a knife or shake it 
off. But if you are wearing two coats, the hoar frost 
will probably gather on the inner side of the outer coat. 



ii2 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

Before going into camp you will, accordingly, take off 
your outer coat, turn it inside out and scrape off the 
frost. Or else you may just pull it off as you go in and 
leave it outside the door so that the hoar frost will never 
have a chance to thaw. Next morning you slip it on as 
you go out and, although there may be hoar frost in it, 
it does not annoy you, for it is in the form of dry 
powder. 

The only kind of hoar frost that becomes disagreeable 
is what you allow to melt either in the house or else on 
your body when the weather gets warm. Warm weather 
is, therefore, something to watch and guard against care- 
fully. Changes of temperature are occasionally rapid. 
You may have forty below zero when you start out in 
the morning and hoar frost will gather on the inside of 
your outer coat during the forenoon. In the afternoon it 
may cloud up, the temperature rising to twenty above 
zero. Just as soon as you notice the increasing warmth 
of the air, you must take off your outer coat and either 
put it on the sled where it will remain unthawed, or else 
turn it inside out, shake it and carefully remove all hoar 
frost. 

When you describe this technique of keeping skin 
clothes dry, it sounds a little complicated, but in actual 
practice you get so used to it that it is no more bother 
than brushing a dark "business" suit to keep dust and 
fuzz from showing. 

I had heard and read about Eskimo snowhouses and 
was eager to see one. On this trip, however, Roxy never 
built a real snowhouse, for he considered it more con- 
venient tc carry a square piece of canvas to use along with 
a snow wall. We built each evening a circular wall about 
six feet high and then spread over it our piece of canvas. 



LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA 113 

It had a hole in it for a stovepipe. There was plenty of 
driftwood everywhere and we kept a roaring fire in a 
sheet-iron stove every evening until bed time. When we 
went to sleep the camp became exceedingly cold. While 
the fire was going, sparks used to drop on our canvas 
roof and burn holes in it, so that before the trip was over 
it looked a good deal like a sieve. By shifting my head 
a little I used to be able to lie in bed and follow for an 
hour through one of the holes the motion of some good- 
sized star. When it was forty below outside, I think the 
night temperature inside of the camp must have been 
about twenty below. This is an easily avoidable hardship, 
as I discovered later. However, I was expecting hard- 
ships and was rather pleased to find that at last I had to 
endure something disagreeable. We had plenty of bed- 
ding and were not actually cold, but I had to cover up 
my head in sleeping, and that is unpleasant. 

As a boy I had read James Fenimore Cooper and many 
other stories about Indians and Eskimos. One of the 
ideas I got from all these books was that an Indian never 
gets lost. Traveling down the Mackenzie River I had 
been told by some of the Hudson's Bay traders that this 
was correct and that a*n Indian is almost infallible in find- 
ing his way. Other traders told me that an Indian gets 
lost as easily as anybody, and those called me to notice 
that the other traders who had told me that an Indian 
never loses his way were stay-at-homes. This I verified. 
Perhaps two-thirds of the northern fur traders are traders 
primarily and remain in or near their cabins the whole 
time, no matter how many years they live in the North. 
A few are of an adventurous disposition and travel and 
hunt with Indians. These latter were usually if not al- 
ways of the opinion that a white man with the same 



ii4 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

amount of experience can find his way about better than 
an Indian. 

However, it is difficult to shake off the ideas we have 
held for a lifetime, and when on the third day of travel 
through the Mackenzie delta, Roxy and Sitsak stopped 
frequently to climb upon little hummocks and look around 
and talk with each other, I did not guess what it was all 
about. Finally I asked Roxy and he told me that "may- 
be they were lost." Little by little the doubt on this 
point was removed. They were lost sure enough. For 
two days we wandered aimlessly up one river channel 
and down another, never finding out exactly where we 
were until the morning of the third day when we came 
upon a sled trail and soon after that a camp site. This 
was our old trail and our own camp of two days before. 
We had been traveling in various curves among the is- 
lands and had finally happened upon our own trail. Roxy 
and Sitsak now agreed that at the time when we made this 
camp we had not yet been lost and that we must have 
lost the way a little beyond that. We watched carefully, 
accordingly, and sure enough after following our old trail 
four or five miles we came to a point where it turned to 
one side and where it should have turned to the other. 

A river delta is the easiest of all places in which to 
lose your way. A little farther south the Mackenzie delta 
is thickly forested with spruce but, where we were, the 
islands were all covered with willow. The spruce islands 
can be traversed by sled, although with difficulty, but the 
willow islands are impassable, for the vegetation is so 
tangled that even in summer it is almost impossible to 
force your way through. The shrubbery commonly varies 
in height from four to eight feet. In winter this brush 
retains and holds up such masses of soft snow that there 



LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA 115 

is no thoroughfare for men or sledges. You must, there- 
fore, thread your way through the devious channels be- 
tween the islands, and no man need be ashamed of get- 
ting lost, especially if the light conditions are bad. 

It was now the time when the sun did not rise at all. 
Writers of arctic romance have given this period the name 
of "The Great Night" but that is really a misnomer, con- 
veying a wrong impression. We were only about a hun- 
dred miles north of the arctic circle and at that distance 
you have something like six or seven hours of daylight 
clear enough for reading large print out of doors. The 
sun never actually rises, but at noon you can see the glow 
of it in the south where it lies about as far below the hori- 
zon as a tropical sun would be ten or twenty minutes 
after sundown. The Mackenzie Eskimos when traveling 
at this time of year (and it is their favorite time for 
traveling) ordinarily get up about one or two o'clock in 
the morning and spend three or four hours in cooking and 
in their usual talkative breakfasts. They then hitch up 
the dogs any time between five and seven o'clock and are 
on the road sometime before the faintest dawning. About 
noon they stop so as to have plenty of daylight for mak- 
ing camp and feeding the dogs, and everything is snug 
and comfortable before it is yet dark. On cloudy days 
we sometimes camp as early as ten or eleven o'clock in the 
morning, for on overcast days there are only three or 
four hours of good working light. Pitch darkness such 
as we have in the tropics or "temperate" lands is unknown 
in the Arctic, for even on a cloudy midwinter night there 
is enough light from the stars behind the clouds reflected 
by the snow on the ground so you can see a man in dark 
clothes ten to fifty feet away. 

In many later years in the North I have had hundreds 



n6 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

of different Eskimo traveling companions but never one 
with such contradictory qualities as Roxy. To begin 
with, he was about the cleverest Eskimo I ever saw. In 
some respects he was not far from being a confidence man. 
As he had shown when we nearly lost our lives in the 
autumn gale, he had unlimited courage. I have never 
known any one upon whose quick wit and decisive action 
I would have been so willing to rely in an emergency of 
life and death. He was cheerful under misfortune but 
sulky and morose if he imagined himself to have a griev- 
ance. In some ways he had the white man's point of 
view perfectly after his long association with the whalers. 
In other respects his Eskimo mental attitude was still un- 
modified. 

I had a good example of the Eskimo point of view when 
we had been on the road seven days, which was as long as 
the entire journey to Tuktuyaktok had been estimated 
to take. On account of having lost our way we had made 
only half the distance. The snow was deeper and softer 
than had been expected and we were moving slowly. I 
noticed that the two dogs I had bought from Sten were 
not pulling as well as Roxy's dogs. When I remarked 
upon this, Roxy said rather sulkily that it was no wonder, 
for the poor dogs had had nothing to eat for several days. 
This astounded me, for I knew that there was still some 
fish on our sled, nor did I know any reason why there 
should be nothing to eat for my dogs when his were well 
fed. I had understood it to be a part of our bargain that 
he would provide all the dog feed. He said, however, 
that his bargain had been that he would supply a certain 
number of dogs and I a certain number and that it was 
always the Eskimo custom that when two men traveled 
together each supplied food for his own dogs. This was 



LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA 117 

all the more confusing because he had explained to me 
earlier in the year the Eskimo communistic idea of food, 
where what belongs to you belongs to me equally. He 
now told me that this form of food communism applied 
only when you were at home. He said (and I found it 
later to be true) that you can arrive at a man's house 
with any number of dogs and feed them and your party 
out of his fish pile. But when you leave you are not 
entitled to take with you any of his fish for your men or 
your dogs, but must buy what you want. My two dogs 
could have eaten at his fish pile all winter if we had re- 
mained at Shingle Point, but on a journey it was an 
entirely different thing. 

Roxy now seemed to be angry at me for not having 
brought along fish for my own dogs and also apparently 
at Sten for not having explained to me that it was neces- 
sary. He said that he had fed my dogs for two or three 
days at the beginning of the journey but that each day he 
had done so he had become more angry at the injustice 
of being compelled to do it, until finally, when he found 
we were lost and that the journey was going to be longer 
than we expected, he had stopped feeding them. No ar- 
guments of mine would induce him to feed them now. I 
argued the less because he said it was his intention to stop 
feeding his own dogs either to-night or to-morrow night. 
"For," he said, "dogs are more used than men to going 
without food. They can stand it better, and anyway we 
have the upper hand and must look after ourselves." 

Being new in the Arctic, I was greatly worried by the 
situation and began to picture myself heroically starving 
to death. Of course, there was no real fear of this, for 
it was only seventy-five miles or so to Tuktuyaktok. 
Roxy now told me that he thought there might be two 



u8 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

or three settlements this side of Tuktuyaktok, in which 
case we could secure food that much sooner. 

It was not long after I noticed the slack traces of my 
dogs until they stopped pulling entirely. Roxy then un- 
hitched them and let them follow behind the sled. From 
my experience with the Indians up the river and from 
the fact also that Roxy seemed to be angry not only at 
me for not providing dog feed but also at my dogs for 
pulling so badly, I wondered why he did not cut a willow 
switch from the river bank and try to whip them into 
pulling. When I asked him about it he said that whipping 
tired dogs was one of the white man's customs which he 
had not yet learned. The Eskimo idea was that a dog 
should be treated with great consideration, and his opin- 
ion was that a good dog would pull about as long as he 
had any strength without being whipped. Whipping, he 
said, would not help our speed much, if any, but would 
hurt his reputation and lower his standing in the com- 
munity. He told me that the only approved Eskimo 
method of inducing dogs to work is either by shouting to 
them and trying to cheer them up by the voice, or else by 
having some person walk ahead of the team of whom the 
dogs are fond so that they will pull hard to try to keep up. 

I regret to say that during the twelve years following 
1906 the Mackenzie River Eskimos adopted the custom 
of whipping dogs, so that when I was among them last 
(19 1 8) it was only a few of the old men who did not 
do so. 

Something like forty miles from Tuktuyaktok we be- 
gan to look for people at well-known camp sites, but all 
the camps turned out to be deserted. We were thirty 
miles away when our dogs had become so weak that it 
was necessary to leave behind most of our belongings. 




U 2 



LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA 119 

For several days all of us had been taking turns pulling 
on the sleds. After stopping feeding the dogs, we still 
had fish enough for three or four days for ourselves at a 
little more than half rations. 

Some fifteen miles from Tuktuyaktok we came upon 
a new sled trail. When the dogs got the strong smell 
from the fresh tracks of the men and dogs, they inter- 
preted it to mean food and began to pull with such energy 
that we were able to let go our hauling straps. When at 
last the houses came in sight the people there soon saw us 
and began to shout, and upon hearing this the dogs 
speeded up so that we had to run to keep up with them. 

When we got within about half a mile of the house ten 
or fifteen people came running out to meet us. At their 
head was Ovayuak who welcomed all of us cordially and 
me even more effusively than the others. He was espe- 
cially cordial when Roxy told him that I had come to 
spend the rest of the winter with him because his people 
still lived in the old Eskimo fashion. 



CHAPTER XI 

AN ARCTIC CHRISTMAS WITH AN ENGLISH COUNTRY 
GENTLEMAN 

When we started from Shingle Point it had been the 
understanding that after a few days' visit with Ovayuak, 
Roxy would take me to Harrison's camp on the Eskimo 
Lakes, two or three days' journey south, for I planned 
to spend Christmas with Harrison and then come back 
to the coast to live the rest of the winter at Tuktuyaktok. 
But shortly after we arrived Roxy suggested to me that 
Ovayuak had plenty of dogs and could easily take me 
across to Harrison's, while his own dogs were tired out 
and weakened by having gone several days without food. 
I said that this would be all right if he would arrange with 
Ovayuak for doing it. Roxy replied that he had already 
spoken to Ovayuak and that it was nothing but fun for 
Ovayuak or one of his men to make the trip and that 
it had been agreed between them that I was to pay him 
(Roxy) both for bringing me to Tuktuyaktok and also 
for taking me south to Harrison's. Accordingly, I secured 
from Ovayuak the sixty-pound chest of tea and the two 
Hudson's Bay blankets. The day after receiving this 
pay Roxy and Sitsak started back for the camp at Shingle 
Point. 

The week before Christmas, I asked Ovayuak one day 
when he would take me over to Harrison's, whereupon he 
was greatly surprised and said that he had not considered 
making any such trip. When I told him about the ar- 

120 



AN ARCTIC CHRISTMAS 121 

rangements which Roxy said he had made, Ovayuak 
laughed uproariously and said that his cousin had evi- 
dently been up to his old tricks. It seemed Roxy had 
told Ovayuak that I wanted to stay there until a sled 
came from Harrison's camp to fetch me or until I could 
get some other Eskimo to take me there. Ovayuak said 
I was welcome to stay as long as I liked but that he had 
such a big household and one so difficult to provide for, 
that he would have to fish industriously all winter and 
could not make any trips until after the sun had come 
back. Then he was going to Herschel Island to see his 
married daughter and his new-born grand-daughter. He 
did not think any of the people now living at Tuktuyaktok 
would care to make the trip to Harrison's, but added 
that there were others traveling up and down the coast 
every week or so and probably one of these would take 
me there. "Some people," he said, "are always traveling 
and there are many who don't care just whom they visit 
or in what direction they travel. Some of these will turn 
up soon and we will get them to take you to Harrison's." 

It was not many days later when there arrived my ac- 
quaintance from Shingle Point, Ilavinirk with his wife, 
Mamayauk, and their four-year-old daughter, Noashak. 
Ovayuak suggested at once that here was one of the trav- 
eling type. I was glad to see Ilavinirk for this reason 
and also because I had liked him the first time I met him. 
A further reason was that he brought with him a can of 
salt and I was getting exceedingly salt hungry. 

As I have mentioned earlier, I had to go without salt 
from the time Harrison left us at Shingle Point until 
Sten arrived. Sten had plenty of salt and I borrowed 
what I wanted from him, but when we left Shingle Point 
we had forgotten to take any along. I began to miss it 



122 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

pretty badly on the way down, and Roxy consoled me 
by saying that Ovayuak would be sure to have some. But 
when we got to Tuktuyaktok we found that Ovayuak 
hadn't any. He said that ordinarily Mr. Firth supplied 
him with some as a part of his trade goods, but as the 
Eskimos never cared to eat salt and as he himself never 
thought of asking for it, it happened some years that Mr. 
Firth did not give him any. This was one of those years. 

In that connection Ovayuak raised the question of 
whether a white man really needs salt or whether the salt 
habit with some people is like the tobacco habit with 
others. He said that since he could remember, most of 
the Mackenzie River Eskimos had used tobacco, both 
men and women. Mothers frequently teach tobacco 
chewing to their children before they are one year old, 
and they grow up to be exceedingly fond of it. In fact, 
many Eskimos now imagine that they cannot live with- 
out it. Ovayuak had heard, however, from the men who 
were old when he was a boy, that in their childhood no 
one used tobacco and that when tobacco was first brought 
in (which I estimate to have been about 1850) everybody 
disliked it. Even now he said there were two or three 
Eskimos who did not use tobacco and seemed to get along 
just as well as the others who did. 

On the other hand there were only two or three Eski- 
mos who did use salt and the great majority abhorred it. 
The common Eskimo belief was that the desire for salt 
was peculiar to white men, but he himself thought it was 
only a habit almost any Eskimo might acquire. Con- 
versely, he thought that it was a habit which any white 
man who tried could probably break, and he suggested 
that in a little while I would cease craving it. 

However, I had not stopped worrying when Ilavinirk 



AN ARCTIC CHRISTMAS 123 

came, and when Ovayuak told him about my hankering 
for salt he immediately went out to his sled and brought 
in half a baking powder tin of it. At this I was over- 
joyed and sprinkled salt liberally on my fish the next 
meal. I was a bit disappointed to find the fish not as 
much improved by the salt as I had expected. That did 
not lessen my gratitude to Ilavinirk, and I thought that 
for me this would prove the beginning of better times, 
for used by me alone the pound or two of salt ought to 
last for months. 

When the next meal came I was interested in some- 
thing that was going on and absentmindedly ate the whole 
meal without recalling till the end that I had put no salt 
on my fish. This made me realize that my hankering 
for salt had been in a sense imaginary. I had really been 
without it long enough already to break myself of the 
habit but had been longing for it because I imagined I 
needed it. From that time on I never opened the salt 
can, although I kept it with me in case I should want it. 
A month or two later I lost it, nor did I worry at all 
over the loss. 

It turned out that Ilavinirk was more than willing to 
take me inland. He had just come from the Eskimo 
Lakes country himself where he had been living less than 
a day's journey away from Harrison's camp. He told 
me that his camp was a fine fishing location if you got 
there early enough in the fall. He had arrived too late, 
however, and the fish run had been nearly over. He 
caught a few fish and hunted caribou without success. 
He had snared a few ptarmigan, but altogether it had 
proved a difficult place to make a living and he had now 
just abandoned his house to come down to Ovayuak's 
to live on fish until the sun came back. He had, however, 



i2 4 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

left some gear at his camp and this he would be able to 
fetch back with him on his return after delivering me to 
Harrison's. Some of his best friends also lived on the 
Eskimo Lakes and he would be glad to visit them and 
introduce me to them. 

The territory we traveled through going south from the 
seacoast towards the Eskimo Lakes reminded me of the 
North Dakota prairies where we used to have our cattle 
ranch. There was snow on the ground, of course, but 
rather less than there would have been in North Dakota 
at the corresponding time of year, and the grass was 
sticking up here and there through the snow. It was 
evident that if the winter resemblance between an arctic 
and a Dakota prairie was close, the summer resemblance 
would be equally great, and this I have since found to be 
the case. 

Our first day was a short one, only about ten or twelve 
miles, and we came to the trapping camp of a single 
family that lived in a creek bed well stocked with willows. 
Although few of these were more than six or eight feet 
high, they gave an adequate fuel supply. As for shelter 
from winter blizzards, that is something the Eskimos 
cannot imagine to be necessary. If they need a shelter 
for the house they can always build a semi-circular wind- 
break wall of snow blocks in an hour or two that gives 
not only protection but also directs the snow so that the 
blizzard piles it into drifts at some distance from the 
house where it will be in nobody's way. 

The next day we reached the first camp in the Eskimo 
Lakes country where we found Sten's brother-in-law 
Kunak with his family occupying half of a big house, 
and another Alaska family occupying the other half. 
Their house was not the regular beehive type used by the 



AN ARCTIC CHRISTMAS 125 

hunters in the mountains, from whom we had fetched the 
caribou meat in October. It stood just within the fringe 
of spruce trees that surround the Eskimo Lakes. Well 
formed trees thirty and forty feet in height are not rare. 
From these white men could easily build log cabins of 
the type we have all seen either in pictures or otherwise. 
That sort of cabin, as I know from ample experience, 
takes a long time to erect and is difficult to build so well 
that it keeps out the cold adequately. Three or four 
Eskimos can build in a day or two as big a house as three 
or four white men could build in a week or two and the 
Eskimo house will be much warmer. 

The chief reason for the ease of making the Eskimo 
house is that the walls instead of being vertical, slant in 
just a little. If a house has a vertical wall and if you 
try to make it warmer by building a sod wall outside of 
it, then it takes great skill as well as good sods to build 
in such a way that there is not an open space between the 
frame and the sod. But if the wall of the framework 
leans in a little, you can heap sods and earth up against it 
any old way and the sods will hug the frame. Kunak told 
me that it had taken him and the other man three days 
to build this house. It was hexagonal in outline, about 
twenty-two feet in length, and fifteen in width. The 
frame of the walls was of spruce and the roof was of 
split spruce logs. Outside this the walls were of earth, 
with a roof covering of moss and a layer of earth over 
that. There was a great stone fireplace in the center of 
the house directly under the parchment skylight. 

This was the first Eskimo house I had seen that had 
windows also in the walls. Each was made of a single 
pane of ice about an inch thick, two feet wide and four 
feet high, with the lower edge level with the floor. Al- 



126 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

though the house temperature seldom fell below 70 ° these 
windows did not melt, for they were kept hard by the 
outdoors frost which now averaged about 30 ° Fahrenheit 
below zero. On an occasional warm day it was necessary, 
Kunak told me, to curtain them off with a blanket to 
protect them from being thawed by the heat of the 
interior. 

After a pleasant visit at Kunak's house, we traveled 
next day something like twelve miles across one of the 
Eskimo Lakes to the journey's end. Our arrival seemed 
both to surprise and delight Harrison, who was having 
rather a lonesome time, for Kakotok, with whose family 
he was living, knew scarcely a word of English and Har- 
rison had not mastered even the Eskimo jargon. It may 
have been because of his bringing up as an English coun- 
try gentleman or because of a naturally aloof disposition 
that he was living in one house with his Eskimo servants 
in another, on terms about as intimate as if they were 
neighbors in a suburb. Getting some one to talk with 
was a relief to Harrison. It was added good luck that 
both of us were fond of chess, which helped pass the time. 
He was a very good chess player. 

Ilavinirk had told me that he had had to abandon the 
idea of spending the winter on the Eskimo Lakes because 
of the poor fishing. I now asked Kakotok about the fish- 
ing at Harrison's camp and found that, although it had 
been much better than Ilavinirk's, still it was getting 
worse every day, and he much feared that they also would 
have to leave the lakes and come down to the coast. He 
felt sure they would either have to do this or else go with 
the dog teams on a journey to the coast, spending a month 
or so and leaving only some of the family to keep the 
camp in the forest. The feeding of the dogs through 



AN ARCTIC CHRISTMAS 127 

the midwinter is the chief worry of the Eskimos in those 
seasons when food is scarce. Kakotok said that their 
shortage of food was due to late arrival at the Eskimo 
Lakes in the fall. Had they come two or three weeks 
earlier, he considered that they would have had no trouble 
in getting all the food that they could possibly have 
needed for the winter. 

Ilavinirk and Kakotok agreed, and my whole observa- 
tion since has confirmed it, that to make a living in the 
Mackenzie district you should follow the well-known prin- 
ciple of making hay while the sun shines — which here 
means fishing in the fishing season. But throughout the 
preceding winter they had been accumulating fox skins 
and other things which they wanted to sell during the 
summer. The cargoes of trade goods from Edmonton 
ordinarily arrive at Macpherson early in July, and the 
traders that come in through Bering Straits arrive at 
Herschel Island late in July or sometime in August. In 
some places, such as Shingle Point, you cannot fish very 
well until the nights turn dark. But there are many other 
places where the water is muddy and the fishing good 
even during the summer of perpetual daylight. That is 
the logical harvest season, but the Eskimos are then off on 
their trading journeys to Fort Macpherson or Herschel 
Island. Many of them want to visit both places. If 
the season happens to be late, as it was my first summer 
there, the Eskimos hang around Herschel Island until 
the end of August. Harrison and I had hung around 
there with them, and so we did not leave for the fishing 
grounds until it was too late for either the Eskimos or 
Harrison to la,y up a suitable supply. 

I used to go with Kakotok to see how he fished. There 
were two methods in use on the Eskimo Lakes. One 



128 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

was very simple and depended on a little open patch 
where the water flows out of the lake into the river that 
takes it to the sea. Here the rapid current prevents the 
formation of ice in even the coldest weather, and nets can 
be set exactly as in summer. In other places the nets 
had to be set through the ice. 

In getting ready to fish through ice you fasten 
your floats to one edge of the net and your sinkers to 
the other, so that one edge of the net shall be held at 
the surface of the water and the other down vertically. 
Then you cut two holes in the ice about forty feet apart 
(for that is a common length for Eskimo nets) and each 
a foot or eighteen inches in diameter. Between these two 
holes you cut a series of smaller holes just big enough to 
stick your arm into the water, and perhaps six or eight 
feet apart. Next you take a stick of dry, buoyant wood 
that is eight or ten feet long. You shove it down through 
one of the end holes until it is all in the water, when it 
floats up and rises against the ice. You have a string 
tied to the stick and this string you fasten to one end of 
the net. Then you lay the stick so that, while one end 
is still visible at your hole, the other end is visible below 
the next hole six or eight feet away. You now go to the 
second hole, put your hand into the water and slide the 
stick along under the ice until you can see it through the 
third hole. The stick, of course, pulls the string in after 
it and by the time you have worked the stick along to 
the furthest hole your net is set. You now take a rope 
that is about ten feet longer than the net and tie each end 
of the rope to one end of the net so as to make an "end- 
less chain," the net being under the water and the rope 
on top of the ice. 

During the night the holes all freeze over. You allow 



AN ARCTIC CHRISTMAS 129 

the small holes to remain frozen permanently but each 
time you go out to tend the net you open the two end 
holes and pull the net out of one of them. As you pull 
the net out the rope part of your endless chain is pulled 
into the water. When you have picked all the fish out 
of the net, you pull on your rope and thus drag the net 
back into the water. 

I am lucky in having hands that stand cold pretty 
well, but when I came to help Kakotok pick fish out of 
a net at forty below zero I found it the coldest job I had 
ever tried. We dragged the whole net up on the ice and 
the wriggling fish soon got themselves all covered with 
snow. This turned into slush on their wet bodies. A 
fish feels cold enough at best but these felt particularly 
chilly. 

It does not make any difference if the net all freezes 
into lumps while you are getting the fish out. Our net 
got so balled up with snow and slush which turned into 
ice that if it had remained in that condition it would have 
caught no fish after being put back into the water. Ka- 
kotok told me, however, that the water in the lake was 
warm enough to melt the ice off the net, whereupon the 
strain between the floats and the sinkers compelled the 
net to take its proper vertical position in the water. 

Kakotok was setting three nets and he got from twenty 
to fifty fish a day, ranging in weight from one to four 
or five pounds. This was about as much as the men 
and dogs of the household were eating, and when visitors 
came the camp ran behind to the amount eaten by the 
visiting men and dogs. This made evident the validity 
of what Kakotok had told me, that they would either have 
to abandon the camp entirely or else some of the family 
would have to go off on a visit, taking away the dogs 



130 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

and leaving only one to two persons to tend the nets. 
That way several hundred fish could be accumulated 
against the return of the party from the coast. 

In the books I had read about the Eskimos I had al- 
ways been impressed with how lonesome and depressing 
it must be to spend the several weeks of midwinter with- 
out one ray of sunlight. This had been worrying me a 
great deal even before the sun disappeared, but Roxy 
had told me that he had never heard of any Eskimos 
who minded the absence of the sun, and had added that 
all white men got used to it after a year or two. Sten 
had confirmed this and, altogether, I had gathered from 
him and the Eskimos that in the Arctic the period of the 
sun's absence is looked forward to by everybody and is 
the jolliest time of the year. 

It is not that the whites and Eskimos that live in the 
Far North prefer darkness to daylight; neither do we in 
the big cities prefer stifling August to the moderate days 
of May or September. Still, there are many of us who 
look forward to August because, although it is disagree- 
able in weather, it is agreeable in being the vacation time. 
That seems to be about the Eskimo point of view. In 
midwinter it is almost impossible to hunt caribou or moun- 
tain sheep and less pleasant than usual to fish or to trap. 
Accordingly, they make it the vacation time and utilize 
it for taking long journeys and for dancing, singing, and 
general rejoicing. 

I understood already that this was the attitude of the 
Eskimos and of such white men as Sten who had lived 
there for many years. For myself I was so impressed 
with the idea that I would find the winter depressing 
that I really found it so — at least occasionally when I 
had time to think about it. Harrison was a good mathe- 




u 



w 



AN ARCTIC CHRISTMAS 131 

matician and enjoyed calculations and plottings. He had 
it estimated that in our particular location the hills to 
the south were just so high and the hills at our camp 
were of just such another height, and accordingly the 
sun would appear above the horizon the 15th of January, 
if the temperature was about zero, and probably a day 
or even two days earlier if the temperature should be 
thirty or forty below zero. I accordingly climbed to the 
top of the highest nearby hill on the 15th, and sure 
enough, saw half the sun above the horizon. I then 
went home and wrote a long entry in my diary, telling 
how glad I was to have the sun back. My joy was real, 
but I now think that the preceding depression and the 
consequent relief when the sun came back were largely 
due to my imagination. I had read in the books that I 
was going to be depressed. Had the books said nothing 
about it, I think I should have failed to notice it. Any- 
way, I have since spent nine winters in the North and 
have never again felt any particular exhilaration at the 
return of the sun. I have always been glad, however, to 
see it rising higher and higher in the sky, for, although 
the two or three months following its return are the 
coldest of the arctic winter, they are on the whole much 
the pleasantest part of the year, especially for one who 
enjoys activity and wants to work outdoors all the time. 
By the middle of January Mr. Harrison's fish pile 
was getting noticeably smaller. He had a little flour, 
just enough to make you wish you had more bread with 
your fish. We could not eat more bread than we did or 
it would not have lasted him till spring. He was anxious 
to have it last, for he had the view (which I have since 
found to be the opposite of practical) that it was best 
to save such delicacies as you had so as to have a little 



132 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

every day. With men who are fonder of bread than they 
are of fish or meat, it is simplest to let them eat up the 
flour as fast as they like. When it is gone they worry 
for two or three weeks and then forget all about it. But 
if they have a little taste every day, they worry every day 
and every meal because they have less than enough. 

To remove temporarily from his fish supply the burden 
of all the dogs, and also to deliver me back at Tuktuyak- 
tok, Harrison and his party left for the coast on January 
26, and three days later we were welcomed by Ovayuak 
at Tuktuyaktok. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 

It was only after my return to Tuktuyaktok that I be- 
gan to live like a real Eskimo. Up to this time there had 
always been some difference between me and the natives. 
Sometimes I had salt when they had none, and generally 
my fish had been cooked in a special way. When they 
had been eating theirs boiled or raw frozen, mine had 
been roasted or baked; and when they ate heads, I seldom 
joined them although occasionally I allowed myself to 
be coaxed to taste this great delicacy of theirs. Ovayuak 
told me now that he would have things specially prepared 
for me if I wished it, but I decided to stop pampering 
myself, partly because it was a bother for the Eskimos to 
look after me specially and partly because I wanted to 
live exactly as they did so as to get their point of view. 

The house we lived in had a framework of driftwood 
and the roof was supported by numerous wooden pillars. 
The earthen walls were five or six feet thick at the base 
and became thinner towards the top of the wall, which was 
only about five feet high. Then the roof sloped up from 
all sides in "cottage" fashion, and at the peak was a level 
square space about six feet each way. There was about 
a foot of earth on top of the roof planking. In the center 
of the roof was a window about three feet in diameter, 
made by sewing together translucent strips of polar bear 
intestines. On a clear day in midwinter this window 
gave enough light so that all the lamps could have been 
extinguished for about four hours. 

133 



134 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

The lamps never were extinguished, for we needed them 
for heat. Usually there were three or four of them 
burning, each in a corner of the house. They were huge, 
half-moon shaped bowls that had been adzed out of blocks 
of soapstone. The wick was a ridge of powder lying 
along the straight edge of the lamp. This powder was 
sometimes hard wood sawdust, sometimes powder made 
by scraping or sawing walrus ivory and sometimes it was 
dried moss that had been rubbed into powder between the 
hands. Occasionally if other materials gave out, they 
would take small pieces of manila rope that had been 
secured from the whalers, and hack the fibers into lengths 
of one-twentieth of an inch or less, thus practically con- 
verting the fibers into powder. Sometimes we tried to 
use ordinary commercial lamp wicks but they were much 
more difficult to keep burning properly, for the Eskimo 
women are very particular that the lamp shall never 
smoke the least bit. No duty of a housekeeper is more 
important than to keep the lamp well trimmed. 

For ideal burning the bowl of the lamp must always be 
almost full of oil but never quite full. This is regulated 
in a simple automatic way. A slab of polar bear or seal 
fat is hung almost over the flame. If the oil in the lamp 
gets a little too low, there is more of the lamp wick ex- 
posed and the flame becomes bigger. The increased heat 
of the flame tries out the fat hanging over the lamp and 
makes the oil trickle down more rapidly. This gradually 
raises the level of the oil in the bowl until it floods part 
of the wick and decreases in that way the size of the 
flame. This cools off the vicinity of the lamp enough 
so that the slab of blubber stops dripping. Then the 
flame gradually increases in size as the oil lowers in the 
lamp until a second flaring up again brings streams of 



THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 135 

oil down from the slab of fat. A lamp once properly- 
prepared in this way will burn with regular fluctuations 
six or eight hours at a time. 

Ordinarily the lamps that are properly trimmed when 
people go to bed in the evening are still burning brightly 
the next morning. Occasionally, however, some woman 
forgets to put quite enough blubber on the hook above the 
lamp. In that case the lamp will begin to smoke during 
the night. I do not think the Eskimos have keener ears 
or keener eyes than Europeans, but they certainly have 
a much more delicate sense of smell. The least bit of 
smoke in the house will wake up somebody who shouts 
to the particular woman that her lamp is smoking and 
warning her to look after it. 

Because the walls and roof of the house were so thick, 
scarcely any cold penetrated in to us that way and the 
only chill came by way of the fresh air that ventilated 
the house. The floor of the dwelling was level with the 
ground outside. The entrance was a kind of tunnel about 
thirty feet long and covered by a shed. The tunnel was 
about four feet deep where it came in under the house 
wall, so that you had to stoop low to enter. Once inside 
the wall, you could stand up in the end of the tunnel 
with your shoulders in the house. We spoke of this en- 
trance as the door, but it was really only a square hole 
in the floor about four feet in diameter. There was a lid 
available with which to cover the door, but I never saw 
it used. The temperature in the alleyway was about as 
cold as outdoors but our house was so full of warm air 
that the cold air in the alleyway could not enter, for cold 
air is heavy and will not rise into any space occupied by 
warm air. 

In the roof we had a ventilator about four inches in 



136 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

diameter. The even flame of the lamps kept the tempera- 
ture of the house day and night fluctuating somewhere 
between 75 ° and 85 ° Fahrenheit. We had a stove but 
this was never used except for cooking, and that com- 
monly only for a period of two or three hours in the 
afternoon. At that time the temperature of the house 
rose to the vicinity of ioo° and sometimes above. It was 
much like living in a Turkish bath. But with the house 
at such a temperature and the air outdoors perhaps 40 ° 
below zero, there was so much difference in weight be- 
tween the outdoors atmosphere and the air in the house 
that the pressure through the door was strong enough 
to drive the warm air out through the ventilator with the 
force of a blast. I once went on top of the house, held 
my hand over the ventilator to test the draught, and got 
the effect of a strong wind blowing. This showed the 
house, although stifling hot, was well ventilated. 

Before coming to live with the Eskimos I had heard 
much about the bad smell of their houses and at first it 
seemed to me that they did smell bad. I soon came to 
realize, however, that this was only the odor of the 
food they ate, corresponding to the odor of coffee or bacon 
in our houses, or perhaps to the odor of garlic in the 
homes of certain Italians. If you are fond of bacon or 
coffee or garlic you do not dislike the smell. Similarly, 
I found that as I gradually became used to the Eskimo 
food and finally fond of it, these odors changed from their 
original unpleasantness until I eventually grew to relish 
them as much when I came in hungry from out of doors 
as a hungry camper in the woods relishes the smell of 
frying bacon. 

Our house had a square open floor space in the middle 
about twelve feet by twelve. In three directions from 



THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 137 

this ran three alcoves, so that the ground plan of the 
house was not very different from the club in playing 
cards. In each one of the three alcoves was a sleeping 
platform about eight inches higher than the floor. Out 
of one alcove there led a door communicating with a 
separate house occupied by an uncle of Ovayuak's, with 
his wife and family. In our big house and in this little 
connected house we were twenty-three all together, not 
counting visitors and there were visitors nearly every 
night. There was just room on the bed platforms for all 
but me to sleep, and when every one else had gone to bed 
I used to spread my blankets on the floor near the door 
so as to be where it was as cool as possible. Whenever 
there were visitors there were others besides me sleeping 
on the open floor space. 

There is very little furniture in an Eskimo house. They 
have the sensible way of getting along with the least 
possible, and much of what they do use they use only 
temporarily and then take it out of doors. Ordinarily 
there is in the alleyway leading out from the Eskimo 
house a side chamber where certain articles of furniture 
are kept that are frequently used. Whenever one is 
needed somebody goes to bring it in. Other things less 
frequently used are kept on an elevated platform outside 
the house. Here are kept also the food and any property 
the people may own, such as rifles that are not in use, 
bolts of cloth purchased from the whalers, or the like. 

But it is the custom to keep in the house the cooking 
gear and the little movable tables upon which the food is 
prepared and eaten. These took up some floor space and 
so did our sheet-iron stove that was used for cooking. 
When visitors were numerous the tables were moved out 
into the alleyway, and occasionally the stove also had to 



138 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

be taken down and moved out so as to give sleeping room. 
If that did not suffice, then the visitors had to make a 
camp of their own outside, coming into our house to visit 
and join us at meals. 

I found nothing so hard to get used to as the excessive 
heat at night. The Eskimos take off all their clothing 
and sleep under some light cover. Being lower down and 
nearer the door than the rest, I was a little cooler and 
soon got so I found it tolerable. Eventually I became 
so reconciled to the excessive heat that I almost liked 
it. 

There was no regular time of getting up in the morning. 
Most of these Eskimos were great smokers and I used to 
be wakened by the crackling of a match at perhaps four 
or five o'clock when somebody woke up to have a smoke. 
Commonly those earliest ones took a few puffs at their 
pipes and then went to sleep again. But about five or 
six o'clock some smoker would not go to sleep but would 
instead open a conversation with another smoker. The 
bed platforms were wider towards the center of the house 
than they were towards the walls, so that all the people 
slept with their heads towards the center of the house. 
This made it easy for a man to rise on his elbow and talk 
to somebody across the floor. 

After half an hour or so of conversation in which more 
and more people joined, somebody would finally say that 
it was time to be having breakfast. Then would arise 
a discussion among the women as to which of them should 
go out and fetch the fish. This was all amiable and with 
a great deal of laughter. When two or three women had 
been decided on, they would generally have a race to see 
which could dress the fastest. Putting on Eskimo clothes 
is about as simple as it is for firemen to dress. There 



THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 139 

are no buckles, everything slips on easily, and the only 
things to be fastened are belts and drawstrings. There 
are some slight differences in the clothes of men and 
women but they are about equally easy to put on. 

I never actually timed these breakfast-getters but I do 
not think it took them more than from thirty to forty-five 
seconds to get completely dressed. Then they ran out 
and presently returned with armfuls of frozen fish, car- 
ried somewhat as a farmer carries an armful of firewood. 
The fish were thrown upon the floor with a clatter and 
more conversation went on for about half an hour, until 
it was considered that the fish were suitably thawed. 
Then the women would take their half-moon shaped 
knives and cut off the heads of the fish, to be saved till 
the afternoon's cooking. Then they would run a straight 
cut along the back of each fish from neck to tail, and 
another along the belly. They would then take one 
corner of the skin between their teeth and strip it off 
somewhat as one might a banana, if one did strip a banana 
with his teeth. If the fish were large, they were cut into 
segments but if they weighed no more than a pound or 
two they were left in one piece. 

In a big family like ours the fish was put on several 
platters so that no one would have too far to reach. Be- 
fore the platters were distributed Ovayuak's wife used 
to look them over and pick out the best pieces for the 
children, for it is the custom that in all things children 
are more favored than even the most influential member 
of the family or the most respected visitor. Next after 
the children the visitors would have their choice in a fam- 
ily where one fish tray served, but in a big family they 
take their chances more or less. If there are three sleep- 
ing platforms there would be a separate tray for each 



i 4 o HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

platform, and the visitors would share with those members 
of the family that slept on that platform. 

We did not commence eating until the fish were nearly- 
thawed, so that their flesh was not much harder than 
typical ice cream. We ate as much as we liked of any 
piece and then put the remainder back on the tray or into 
another tray. Eskimos are careful that no food goes to 
waste, but leaving half your piece means no waste, for 
the dogs have to be fed and the leavings go to them. 

By seven o'clock every one is dressed and ready to go 
about the day's work. Ovayuak himself was always the 
first to go out to the fishing grounds. Certain members 
of his family always followed. It was optional with visi- 
tors whether they helped with the fishing but all of them 
did unless they had something else to do. Had some one 
refrained entirely from work of all sorts, I do not think 
our host would have done anything about it, nor would 
the rest of the community. But a lazy man is despised 
by everybody, and what keeps anybody at work is not 
the fear that he may be turned out of the house, but 
rather the dread of a public opinion which would eventu- 
ally give him a low rating in the community. Such low 
rating would not be followed by any formal punishment, 
but no Eskimo seems to be able to bear the disapproval 
of his countrymen. This is one of the reasons why so 
few of the uncivilized Eskimos are lazy. I judge from 
my own experience that the stimulating climate is another 
important reason. I often feel lazy in southern countries, 
but I find activity a delight in the North. 

I used to go with Ovayuak to his fishing. We were on 
one of the branches of the Mackenzie delta and the river 
ice was at that time about three feet thick. I did not 
understand very well how to use an ice chisel and at first 



THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 141 

it took me half an hour to make a fishing hole ten inches 
in diameter through three feet of ice, but Ovayuak could 
do it in a few minutes. For a rod we each had a stick 
about two feet long and attached to it a slender line of 
braided caribou sinew about four or five feet long. On 
the end of this was a little fish carved out of ivory about 
two inches in length. A hole had been bored in the head 
of the fish, a shingle nail stuck through, bent and sharp- 
ened. This sort of tackle is bait and hook in one. When 
a fish bites you must not give him any slack; if you do 
he will get off the hook, for there is no barb to hold him. 
There are only two tricks in this fishing: one is to keep 
jiggling the hook so that the ivory fish squirms around 
in the water much as a live minnow would; the other is 
to pull suddenly and keep pulling when you have a bite 
until your catch is on the ice. 

We were getting several kinds of fish; the largest 
variety are called by the Eskimos sit and by the Hudson's 
Bay traders connie. The Eskimo name is merely plain 
Eskimo but the white man's name is said to come from 
the French "l'inconnu," which means "the unknown" fish. 
It is pretty hard to classify. It used to be called "Mac- 
kenzie River salmon" but now I believe it has been de- 
cided that it is not a salmon at all. It is a scaly fish with 
white flesh and may attain a huge size. I have seen some 
more than three feet in length, weighing over forty pounds 
and have heard that they sometimes weigh sixty or sev- 
enty pounds. At Tuktuyaktok we seldom got any weigh- 
ing more than thirty pounds, and fifteen-pounders were 
perhaps above the average. 

In six or seven hours of work we would catch on a 
good day four to eight fish of various sorts, or anything 
from ten to forty pounds per man. There were seldom 



142 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

more than five or six of us fishing, and counting visitors 
we had on an average more than thirty people to feed 
and about fifty or sixty dogs. I imagine the people ate 
about five pounds each and the dogs two or three pounds 
each. This meant that, although we were catching fish 
pretty rapidly, our store of them was getting smaller 
each day. There were several tons that had been ac- 
cumulated in the fall, but Ovayuak said he thought we 
would do well if we did not come to the end of it before 
the end of March. I applied my mathematical knowledge 
to the case and assured him that the fish would last longer 
than that, but he replied that so they would if our family 
did not increase in size; but he fully expected that short- 
age of food would come upon various neighboring com- 
munities presently and that people from these would 
gradually gather at Tuktuyaktok. 

In this connection Ovayuak explained to me why he 
was a chief. He was two kinds of chief. The Hudson's 
Bay people called him chief because they had picked him 
out as the most influential man in the community with 
whom to deal on behalf of the rest of the Eskimos. This 
was purely a Hudson's Bay Company's idea and Ovayuak 
said it had at first been incomprehensible to himself and 
the other Eskimos. I knew from the traders that they 
were used to dealing with Indian chiefs all up the Mac- 
kenzie valley and, indeed, all over Canada. Most of 
these Indian chiefs have real legal power over their tribes, 
the power having either been inherited from the father 
who was also a chief or else having been given by a formal 
election to chieftainship. When the Hudson's Bay men 
penetrated north to the Eskimos they took it for granted 
the Eskimos would also have chiefs and inquired who the 
chief was. When the Eskimos were unable to point to 



THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 143 

any man who was chief, for such an idea did not exist 
among them, the traders watched and found out who were 
the most active and influential people. They then decided 
for themselves that these were the chiefs, and called 
them so. 

Ovayuak's uncle had been a man of good judgment 
and great energy and had been influential in consequence, 
for that is the Eskimo way. Him the Hudson's Bay 
people had picked out to call chief and had made him 
their representative. This trust on the part of the Com- 
pany in turn increased this uncle's influence, so that 
eventually he came to have more power than any Eskimo 
had had before him. This was not comparable to the 
authority an elected officer has among us, but rather 
comparable to the influence exercised by a public-spirited 
and successful man. When Ovayuak's uncle died, the 
Hudson's Bay Company had found that Ovayuak him- 
self had the most influence and had concluded that he had 
become chief. It was for this reason that Firth had 
introduced him to me as such. 

This was the white men's aspect of the chieftainship. 
So far as the Eskimos were concerned Ovayuak was a 
man of influence because of his good judgment in part 
but also because he had kept to the ways of his fathers 
better than most of the others. When the rest spent 
nearly the whole summer in long journeys to Fort Mac- 
pherson and Herschel Island for purposes of trading, he 
made only a quick journey to Fort Macpherson, return- 
ing immediately to the fishing grounds. As I have men- 
tioned above, the best run of fish ordinarily comes while 
the main body of Eskimos are still engaged in selling their 
furs either to the Hudson's Bay Company or the whalers. 
But when these people returned to the fishing grounds 



144 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

with their silks, photographs, chewing gum and whatever 
else they had bought from the traders, Ovayuak would 
already have tons of fish laid up. 

When the trading season was over, all the Eskimos 
would fish energetically each in the location which he had 
picked out that year (for they seldom keep the same lo- 
cation more than one season at a time). But with the 
best efforts few of them secured even half as much as 
they needed, for their late start had handicapped them 
too much. Ovayuak told me it was his great pride that 
in midwinter or towards spring when these people came 
to the end of their food supply, they would always say 
to each other, "Let us go to Ovayuak; he will have food 
if anybody has." 

This was the main reason that gave him influence 
among his own people. It would never have occurred to 
him to refuse food to any one; in fact, it seemed to him 
that they had as much right to his fish as he had himself, 
for his people are communists and that is the way they 
look upon things. He never said to any one, "You must 
take orders from me if I am to give you food." Neither 
did he ever issue orders. The fact was, however, that if 
it was known he wanted anything done, everybody was 
eager to do it for him. Though he had no formal or legal 
power, he had the respect and good will of every one so 
fully that it amounted to the most absolute power. 

Ovayuak's fishing hole and mine were only a few feet 
apart. The wind naturally changed from day to day 
and each morning he would build a semi-circular wall of 
snow about five feet high to shelter us against the wind. 
Dressed in our furs we sat very comfortably and talked. 
Really it was he who did most of the talking, for I in- 



THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 145 

sisted that we must not speak anything but Eskimo. Of 
this I knew almost none. He had the greatest patience in 
first saying a thing to me in plain Eskimo and then ex- 
plaining it in the jargon (of which I had secured complete 
command at Herschel Island and Shingle Point). How- 
ever, I now know that I misunderstood many things when 
he first explained them, and doubtless there were many 
things which I did not understand at all. 

Adequately dressed and seated on blocks of snow in 
the shelter of our wind-breaks, we talked as comfortably 
as if the weather had been warm, though the mercury 
in my thermometer frequently fell to 40 ° below zero. 
That was no colder than what I was used to in Dakota 
and, as my clothes were now much more satisfactory 
than they had been in Dakota, I was more comfortable 
than any one could conceive who has tried to protect 
himself against winter cold merely by putting on a heavy 
fur overcoat over a business suit. 

We used to fish till about four in the afternoon. The 
people who were at home would have about noon a lunch 
of frozen fish similar to our breakfast. This we fisher- 
men missed. About an hour before the rest of us were 
ready to quit work, Ovayuak's wife, who usually fished 
with us, would precede us home to start the cooking. 
Nearly every one of my Eskimo friends had a watch, 
but our return in the afternoon depended not on the time 
as shown by their watches, but on the daylight, and that 
depended on the cloudiness. Also Ovayuak liked to stay 
at his work as long as he felt like it. When we got home 
we usually found that the meal was not quite ready, but 
by the time we had taken off our outer garments and 
removed the hoar frost from them, we would have before 



146 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

us huge platters of steaming boiled fish. This was my 
fifth month among the Eskimos and by now I enjoyed 
a meal of boiled fish as much as any Eskimo. 

After dinner no formal work was done although every- 
body was always busy at something — carving ivory, 
cleaning rifles, or even taking a watch apart to repair it. 
Most Eskimos are clever with their hands and some have 
besides a mechanical turn of mind. Kakotok, for in- 
stance, who worked for Harrison, had some years before 
bought a watch from a whaler. When it stopped one 
day he took it to pieces and found the mainspring 
broken. He then dismembered a cheap alarm clock and 
with a file and what other tools he had, he made out 
of the clock mainspring a spring for his watch and put 
it in so the watch ran. This I did not see myself but 
I had the story from a reliable whaling captain and do 
not doubt it. By the time I came among the Eskimos 
there were many of them who repaired watches with 
parts taken from other watches. Doing this had become 
a pastime and I am afraid that they sometimes injured 
a delicate watch by taking it apart when it was not 
necessary. 

While the men were making and repairing things and 
the women sewing and doing other work, some one would 
usually sing or tell a story. The singing might or might 
not be to the accompaniment of a tom-tom, which is their 
only musical instrument. Their stories were of two 
kinds. Some were well-known folklore tales. Every- 
body knew them so exactly that the chief interest was 
in watching the narrator and laughing at him if he made 
the slightest mistake. The other kind of stories were 
the personal adventures of the narrators. In that case 
every one listened carefully without making comments 



THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 147 

until the end, when there always was a fusillade of 
questions. 

They frequently asked me to tell about how condi- 
tions were in the white man's country, but I soon found 
that they were really not much interested and that this 
was largely courtesy. At first I thought their lack of 
interest might be due to my inability to make myself 
understood, but I found in later years after I got com- 
mand of fluent Eskimo that this was not the case. They 
have far less interest in the white man's world than we 
have in theirs. The whaling captains told me that they 
had found no Eskimo who was willing to go with them 
to San Francisco (which was their outfitting port) except 
for wages. The idea of any one wanting to go to a place 
for the sake of seeing it struck them as curious. They 
had no intention of living in San Francisco and if they 
did not want to live there, why should they go there? 
The only possible motive they could see was that the 
whaling captains wanted them to work for them, in which 
case they were perfectly willing to go if they were prom- 
ised sufficient wages so that at the end of a year they 
would return to their people with a larger amount of 
goods than they could have purchased for the foxes they 
might have trapped during the same year. It is only 
when an Eskimo community becomes "civilized" that 
some of the Eskimos begin to want to go south to see 
the big cities. 

I used to try to explain to Ovayuak that the climate 
of San Francisco was very good. (We always spoke of 
San Francisco because the name was well known to the 
Eskimos. In general the Mackenzie Eskimos at that 
time took the name to mean the whole world of white 
men). When I praised the southern climate he asked 



148 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

me whether it was not always summer there. On my 
replying yes, he said that undoubtedly white men might 
like that sort of climate, but that an Eskimo could not 
understand that a country could be pleasant where it was 
always summer. He said that they do look forward to 
winter changing into spring and spring into summer, but 
that they rejoice still more when summer changes into 
fall and winter. After all, you soon get tired of the heat. 
In winter, he said, a hot house is good, for you can 
always go out and cool off; but where can you flee to 
from the heat of summer? 

Had I been idle and with no interest in the language 
and customs of the people, I might have found the life 
at Ovayuak's tedious. But everything that happened 
was of vivid interest and I continually had my diary out 
scribbling information about strange customs and making 
notes of new words. 

Nothing was more interesting than the way they dealt 
with the extreme heat of the cooking time in the after- 
noon. As I have said, the temperature sometimes rose 
above ioo°. On coming into the house, we took off all 
our clothes except knee breeches, so that every one was 
stripped from the waist up and from the knees down. 
The children up to the age of six or seven were entirely 
naked. One of the occupations of the men was to sit 
for hours with blocks of beautiful white spruce drift- 
wood, whittling them into long shavings resembling 
excelsior. These shavings were put into great piles in 
the corners and into bags and boxes. Because of the 
extreme heat there were streams of perspiration running 
down the faces and bodies of most of the people, 
although, of course, the Eskimos differ among themselves, 
as we do, in the freedom with which they perspire. 



THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 149 

Those who perspired most would take handful after 
handful of excelsior, rub themselves with it towel fashion, 
and then throw each handful away. 

In some respects the Eskimos are less cleanly than we 
but in other respects more cleanly. Many of us wipe 
frequently with the same towel; in later years when our 
towels became fashionable among the Eskimos they 
learned from white men to use each towel several times 
and eventually became much worse than almost any of 
us in using filthy towels. But of their native excelsior 
they never used a handful more than once, throwing it 
into a waste pile to be burned eventually. 

Not really to get relief from the heat, but rather for 
pleasant stimulation (as we take cold showers after a 
turkish bath) one or another of the perspiring people 
would run out and stand for a few minutes outdoors, 
naked but for the knee breeches. I never knew of any 
bad results from this practice — why should there be, if 
we escape injury who like to finish off a warm bath with 
a cold shower? 

An hour or two after the afternoon meal was over the 
house would cool down to the normal temperature of 
75 or 80 °, at which those are comfortable who are used 
to it. 



CHAPTER XIII 

LEARNING TO BUILD A SNOWHOUSE AND TO BE 
COMFORTABLE IN ONE 

I had expected to stay at Tuktuyaktok until March or 
April but now I began to think that it might be impor- 
tant to get into touch with my expedition which, accord- 
ing to Captain Leavitt's guess, should be wintering some- 
where along the Alaska coast two or three hundred miles 
west of Herschel Island. Accordingly, when the time 
came for Ovayuak and his wife to make their trip to 
Herschel Island to see their new granddaughter, I asked 
to be allowed to go with them. At first Ovayuak refused, 
saying that the time immediately after the sun returns 
is the coldest of the year and that a white man cannot 
stand traveling in such weather. I pointed out that he 
intended to take with him his youngest child, a boy of 
three or four. But he replied that if I were also a small 
child he would not mind taking the two of us, for you 
can bundle a baby up in furs and strap him into a sled, 
but I was too big for that. I asked where he got the 
idea that a white man could not stand cold, and he said 
he had heard about it indirectly from the whalers. His 
own observation had been that those white men he had 
actually traveled with were rather good travelers but 
he supposed they must be exceptional, for his cousin 
Roxy and others who had worked with the whalers had 
been told by the white men themselves how greatly the 
Eskimos excel in their ability to stand cold. 

150 



LEARNING TO BUILD A SNOWHOUSE 151 

In general I think Ovayuak believed most of the things 
I told him, but when I explained that the cold of Dakota, 
where I was brought up, was about as intense as that of 
the Mackenzie district, he could not reconcile it with 
what he had always heard from the other white men of 
how warm "San Francisco" was. I tried to explain that 
the white man's country is large, with all sorts of climate, 
and that if the whalers were not used to cold, this did 
not apply to me. Eventually I argued him into allowing 
me to go along, but I know he looked forward to a rather 
worrisome time. 

He estimated the journey would take about ten or 
twelve days. When I pointed out that it would not have 
taken Roxy and me that long last fall but for our get- 
ting lost, Ovayuak answered that the weather was now 
much colder and that, while a sled slides over the snow 
easily at such temperatures as we had in the fall, the 
runners would now grate on the sharp snow crystals 
almost as if we were dragging them over sand, and that 
we could not expect in midwinter to make much more 
than half the speed one could in the fall or spring. He 
expected that both he and his wife would have to pull 
in harness with the dogs and, while he did not expect 
me to do that unless I felt like it, I must understand 
that he could not allow me to ride. 

Although I was a little worried about the journey in 
advance, partly from Ovayuak's talk and partly from the 
dreadful stories I had read in books of arctic exploration 
about the hardships of winter travel, I was still amused 
at the idea that I might have to ride when we were 
traveling at a speed no more than half of what we had 
made in the fall. Ovayuak admitted having had a rather 
favorable account of me as a traveler from Roxy, but he 



152 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

thought that a white man who does well enough in the 
fall might do less well in winter. 

We started from Tuktuyaktok February ist with our 
sledge heavily loaded with fresh fish. The first night we 
slept at the settlement of Kangianik, about fifteen miles 
to the southwest. We were stormbound there for the 
two days following and on the third day we camped in 
a deserted house, some twelve or fifteen miles farther on 
our road. After that we would have to make our own 
camps all the way to Shingle Point. 

This was my first introduction to the real Eskimo snow- 
house. On the journey east with Roxy we had built 
vertical circular snow walls five or six feet up and had 
put a flat canvas roof over. Ovayuak said that that sort 
of camp was all right in the autumn but now the weather 
was cold and we would be more comfortable in a dwelling 
entirely of snow. 

When it came nearly camp time both Ovayuak and his 
wife began to look for good snow along the way. Some- 
times one or the other of them would run a few yards 
to one side to examine a drift but they were either too 
hard or not hard enough. Eventually we came to one 
that was just right. 

A drift just right for an Eskimo snowhouse is four 
feet or more in depth and of uniform consistency. First 
you determine the surface hardness by glancing at your 
footprints as you walk. With the soft Eskimo footgear, 
you should leave just enough of an imprint so that your 
trail could be followed. If your foot makes no mark 
the snow is too hard, and if it sinks in so that the entire 
outline of the foot is visible in the snow then it is too 
soft. If the surface hardness is right, you next drive 
a rod of some sort down through the snow to judge the 



LEARNING TO BUILD A SNOWHOUSE 153 

consistency of it. Commonly the Eskimos use a four- 
foot long walking stick, about as big around as a broom 
handle. You drive this down with a steady shove, and 
if uniform pressure makes it go smoothly the snow is 
right. But if the stick goes down easily enough for a 
few inches, then requires a much harder shove to drive 
it down the next few inches and then slips along easily 
for a few inches more, your snow is unsuitable for it is 
stratified and the cakes you cut from it will tend to break 
into layers. 

When the right snowdrift has been selected you dig a 
little pit with a shovel to get a good starting place for 
cutting the blocks. Occasionally you are compelled to 
build on a drift that is only a few inches deep and then 
you have to cut your blocks horizontally, but if the snow 
is uniform and the drift deep enough you prefer to cut 
them vertically. The implement is a knife having a blade 
from fourteen to eighteen inches long. The building 
blocks should be about domino-shaped, say from twenty 
to thirty inches long, from twelve to eighteen inches 
wide. When you first cut them they may be any thick- 
ness from four inches up, but if the block is too thick 
you trim it down so that when finished it is only four 
or five inches in thickness. 

In the case of the first snowhouse we built we had to 
cut the snow in one place and build the house a few 
yards off because in addition to hard snow you want 
soft snow nearby to bank the house with after it is 
erected. I watched the building of this first house so 
carefully that I think I should have been able to build 
one similar to it the next day. The procedure is really 
very simple. 

Ovayuak took the first block and put it on edge the 



154 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

way a domino would stand on a table. With his hunting 
knife he then undercut the inner edge slightly so that 
the block leaned in just enough so you could notice it. 
The second block was similarly put on edge, domino 
fashion, and in a position such that the circle eventually 
made would be about ten feet in diameter. The inner 
edge of this block was similarly undercut so that it leaned 
in. This block also leaned against the end of the first 
block so that a pressure from the outside could not have 
pushed one over without pushing both over. In a similar 
manner the other blocks were erected until the first circle 
had been completed. 

I had always wondered how an Eskimo would start the 
second tier of blocks but this proved very simple. 
Ovayuak looked carefully over the whole circle and 
selected a place where the blocks were especially uniform 
in shape and of obviously good material. This was be- 
cause he was a particularly careful builder. I learned 
later that no such nicety is essential and that you can 
start the second tier any place. From a point three 
blocks away from where he intended to begin the second 
tier Ovayuak made a diagonal cut downward so that he 
removed the upper quarter of one block, the upper half 
of the next, and about three-quarters of the third block, 
bringing the cut almost down to ground level. He then 
took a snow block of ordinary size and put it in the niche 
so that its right-hand end rested against the end of the 
whole block that was next to the right. (Had Ovayuak 
been left-handed this process would have been exactly 
reversed; the left-hand end of the first block of the 
second tier would have been set against a block to the 
left of it.) 

Once he had started the second tier, Ovayuak built it 



LEARNING TO BUILD A SNOWHOUSE 155 

to the left, leaning each block against the one previ- 
ously set up, so that the wall rose in a gradual spiral. 
He was going to build a dome-shaped house and the 
blocks of the second tier were, therefore, leaning in more 
sharply than those of the first tier. There was no change 
in method as the house approached completion. The 
higher the blocks are in the wall the more they lean in; 
if you lean each carefully against the one set up before 
it no block can fall unless the end of the preceding block 
against which it leans breaks off. If the blocks are set 
up at all carefully this will never happen. 

Before we started the house building, Ovayuak himself 
had cut fifteen or twenty blocks. While he was building 
I carried these to him while his wife continued cutting 
more blocks. I think it took altogether between forty 
and fifty blocks to finish the house. When she had cut 
what she thought was enough the house was already three 
tiers high. Everywhere between the blocks there were 
crevices, some narrow and some wide. She now started 
rubbing soft snow into these openings, filling each one. 
That had to be done gently, for the wall is fragile at first. 

When the house was three tiers high it became difficult 
for me to lift the blocks high enough to pass them to 
Ovayuak over the wall. He then cut a hole in the wall 
at ground level for me to shove the blocks in to him, 
he taking them up and placing them in position along 
the wall. The complete house required five tiers of 
blocks. 

I had imagined that building the roof would be harder 
than the rest. But when yo*u watch a house actually 
being built, you soon see that roofing it is easier than 
anything. In the ground tiers you are building in a 
circle so large that the two adjoining blocks are almost 



156 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

in a straight line. If you take two dominoes and place 
them on a table end to end in such a position that they 
are nearly in a straight line, then you will find it difficult 
to make them stand by leaning one against the other. 
But if you have the same two dominoes meet at an angle 
of from thirty to forty-five degrees and lean them against 
each other, they will stand supporting each other. The 
like is true of snow blocks. When you get near the roof 
the circle you are working on is less than half the 




Diagram to illustrate the method followed in building a snow-house 

diameter of the original ground circle. The blocks, 
therefore, meet at a much sharper angle and you can 
lean them together more squarely so they support each 
other better. 

When the house is all but completed the builder finds 
in the center of the dome above his head a little irregular 
open space where the blocks do not quite meet. With 
experienced eye he decides how to enlarge this hole so 
as to make it big enough for an average sized block. 
With his sharp knife he snips off the projecting corners 
of the blocks, and now has above him an opening of 
regular shape. It may be square or triangular and occa- 



LEARNING TO BUILD A SNOWHOUSE 157 

sionally it is domino-shaped, so as just to fit the block 
which he has ready. He next takes up a particular snow 
block, trims it so it is a little thinner than the average, 
puts it on end and lifts it vertically up through the hole, 
so that if you are outside you can see his two arms stick- 
ing up through holding the block. He now allows the 
block to take a horizontal position in his hands and 
lowers it gently down upon the opening so as to cover 
it like a lid. The block is somewhat larger than the 
opening, but with his long knife he trims it down to 
exact size gradually, and then allows it to slip into 
place. 

By the time the snow frame of the house was finished 
Ovayuak's wife had all the crevices chinked up as high 
as the third tier. The cracks in the roof Ovayuak filled 
from the inside. When he announced that they had all 
been filled his wife began to shovel soft snow over the 
house. She threw shovelfuls up on the dome but none 
of it stuck there except what filled in the outer part of 
the crevices that had been chinked from the inside. 
Sliding down the sides of the house the soft snow formed 
an embankment all along the bottom of the wall. Even- 
tually when the shoveling was discontinued, the house 
no longer looked like a hemisphere or a dome, but almost 
conical. With the snow piled at the bottom, the walls 
there were three feet thick. Two feet up, the walls were 
only eight or ten inches thick, and the roof was four 
inches — the thickness of the original blocks. 

Ovayuak was now completely shut in, for he had filled 
up the little hole through which I had been passing the 
blocks to him. With a shovel his wife now dug a trench 
about three feet wide down to the river ice, four feet 
below. As if digging a cave she worked from the end 



158 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

of this trench in under the wall of the house to meet a 
hole that Ovayuak was digging down through the floor 
at that spot. Later we built of snow blocks a porch 
over this trench, making the regular Eskimo entrance. 

As soon as the trench had been connected with the 
interior of the house, I crawled in and watched the rest 
of the process. Scattered all around him on the floor 
Ovayuak had fragments of blocks that had been unsound 
and had broken in handling, and there were other blocks 
which for one reason or another he had not used when I 
passed them in to him. Out of these he now made a 
platform a foot high, covering about two-thirds of the 
floor space. Over this platform his wife later spread a 
layer of long-haired caribou skins with the hair down. 
Over that she put a second layer of skins with the hair 
side up and on top of that our blankets — some of them 
reindeer and others cotton or wool. 

A snowhouse is best suited to being heated with a 
lamp, either the Eskimo lamp or, even better, a blue 
flame kerosene stove or an alcohol lamp. We were, how- 
ever, now traveling through a country well supplied with 
driftwood and for that reason we carried a sheet-iron 
stove instead of a heating lamp. We took two pieces 
of wood about four feet long each and placed them on 
the snow as far apart as the length of the stove. On 
top of these we put some sheet iron and on top of it 
the stove itself. A hole was made in the snow roof big 
enough for the stovepipe and over that part of the roof 
we spread a piece of canvas about four feet square that 
had a stove ring sewed to it through which the stovepipe 
projected. 

I thoughtlessly imagined that when the fire was lighted 
it would soon thaw a huge hole in the wall back of the 




Building a Snowhouse 
All the men in this picture are young Americans, members of 
one of Stefansson's expeditions. 




Campmaking in Winter 



LEARNING TO BUILD A SNOWHOUSE 159 

stove and around the stovepipe. The stovepipe hole did 
increase in size gradually as the flames shot up the pipe 
making it red to where it disappeared through the roof. 
There was a certain amount of melting of the snow wall 
back of the stove and, indeed, the entire interior of the 
house melted more or less. But as the snow was gradu- 
ally turned into water, it was soaked blotter-fashion into 
the dry snow outside of it. In the roof this process 
continued until the four-inch blocks had been thawed 
down to perhaps two inches. By that time the roof was 
damp and had become a good conductor of heat, as 
compared with the porous snow. This gave the intense 
cold outside a chance to penetrate in and meet the heat 
from the interior, stopping the thawing and turning the 
damp snow blocks into ice. Thus the thickness of the 
roof is automatically regulated. It thaws thinner and 
thinner until a balance is reached between the outer cold 
and the inner heat. It is only in warm weather that a 
snow roof could be completely melted away even by 
maintaining inside the house a temperature of 70 °. 

While we were cooking supper the snowhouse was 
almost as hot as our earth and wood house at Tuktuyak- 
tok. Ovayuak told me, and I later verified it, that had 
there been no stovepipe hole the snow house would have 
remained at an agreeable temperature all night. As it 
was, however, when the fire went out a certain amount of 
warm air continued to go up through the stovepipe. This 
allowed a corresponding quantity of colder air to enter 
through the open door. The result was that by morning 
it was freezing fairly hard inside the house. Our bedding 
was warm, however, and I did not mind it. In the 
morning when we lighted the fire the house became fairly 
warm in a few minutes and, of course, remained so until 



160 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

we let the fire go out preparatory to packing up the stove 
and the rest of our gear to continue the journey. 

During the evening I had asked Ovayuak whether 
there was no danger of the house caving in on us during 
the night and he had laughed at me. When we were 
about to start, this conversation apparently recurred to 
him, so he asked me if I would like to try how fragile 
the house was by climbing on top of it. I hesitated a 
moment, and he ran up on the roof himself and stood 
on the peak. I then clambered up after him. Had there 
been ten of us our combined weight would not have 
broken the house down. The structure had been very 
fragile in the evening just while we were putting it up, 
but after it had once been dampened by the overheating 
of the interior and had then been turned partially to ice, 
nothing but a sharp blow could have broken it. To begin 
with, the half-solidified blocks of snow were now much 
stronger than they had been ; for another thing, the shape 
of the house was just right to sustain a heavy weight. 
The case of an egg is analogous. You can easily break 
an egg with a sharp blow, but it is not so easy to crush 
a raw egg by squeezing it in the hand if the pressure 
is applied uniformly. 

As we traveled west, the skies were clear every day 
and the cold gradually increased. I did not have a 
thermometer with me but I should judge it was fre- 
quently 35° and even 40 ° below zero: possibly it may 
have been 45 ° below. This was no colder than what I 
had been used to in Dakota. It surprised Ovayuak to 
see how naturally I took to the conditions and he began 
to believe me when I told him that certain parts of the 
white man's country were as cold in winter as his. 

On the twelfth day of our journey we arrived at 



LEARNING TO BUILD A SNOWHOUSE 161 

Shingle Point and found everything well there, both in 
Sten's house and in Roxy's. They had had during the 
winter numerous visitors with dogs and, for one reason 
and another, their store of fish had almost given out. 
As there is no winter fishing at Shingle Point and no 
sealing nearer than twenty miles from there, Roxy's 
household had decided on breaking up. When Ovayuak 
returned from Herschel Island Roxy and his family 
would accompany him back to Tuktuyaktok, while 
Oblutok's family would go up into the forest region of 
the Mackenzie delta where the spring fishing is tolerable 
and where there are rabbits and ptarmigan. 

I had now been living for the last six weeks on fish 
(without salt) and water — no sugar, no flour, no vege- 
tables, nothing whatever but fish and water — and before 
that for three months on about 95% either fish and 
water or meat and water. I had just passed through 
the supposedly depressing midwinter period called "The 
Long Arctic Night" and had just finished my first jour- 
ney under the rigors of a polar winter. Apropos of all 
of it, Sten remarked I must have been putting on weight. 
I weighed myself — 176 pounds. That was ten pounds 
more than I ever had weighed up to that time, and is 
twenty pounds more than I normally weigh when living 
in a city. 



CHAPTER XIV 

TRAVELS AFTER THE SUN CAME BACK 

Although Sten had been whaling in the Arctic for 
something like fifteen years, he had always lived on 
ships in winter or in their vicinity and had never been 
short of groceries. The supplies I had secured for him 
in the fall by the boat trip to Herschel Island had nearly 
given out, so he asked me to take his dog team and fetch 
a load of groceries which he thought Captain Leavitt 
would sell him. The reason why he could not go him- 
self was that he had been troubled the last year with 
epilepsy and did not dare to take chances on traveling. 
I was willing to make the trip but preferred to do so two 
or three weeks later. Accordingly, I remained behind at 
Shingle Point while Ovayuak's party continued west. 

There was now staying with Roxy's family an Eskimo 
named Kanirk, a name that may be translated into Eng- 
lish as "Hilltop." The whalers, who had no idea of the 
meaning of the word, had apparently found in the sound 
of it a suggestion of a well-known English word and had 
called him "Cockney." When first I heard it I took it 
to be a nickname but Captain Leavitt told me later that 
it was merely a careless pronunciation of what the 
whalers believed to be his real name. 

Apart from men who are students of languages, it is 
the general habit of those whites who come in contact 
with Eskimos or Indians to pronounce any words they 
hear, and especially the names of people and places, so 

162 



TRAVELS AFTER THE SUN CAME BACK 163 

as to resemble more or less closely some word of the 
white man's language. For this reason it is certain that 
were three traveling parties to pass through any given 
aboriginal region, one party English, another French, 
and the third Swedish, the three parties would bring back 
very different versions of the names of persons and 
places. This shows how unlikely it is that the Indian 
names that we use in America to designate our rivers, 
mountains and cities are even approximately similar to 
the real Indian pronunciation of those names. 

When I first dealt with the Eskimos their names 
sounded very different to me from what they now do. 
The man whom I call Ovayuak was introduced to me by 
the Hudson's Bay people as "Levayuk," which some of 
the white men had shortened into "Levi." At first the 
name sounded to me a little like "Levayuk" and I used it 
until he himself took me in hand to instruct me. It was 
only after continuous listening to his slow repetitions that 
I began to hear it clearly as O-va-yu-ak. Another good 
example was an Eskimo woman Ikkayuak (Ik-ka-yu-ak), 
whom the white men called "Kashia" saying it was her 
native name. The next sandspit east of Shingle Point is 
called by the natives Akpaviatsiak (Ak-pa-vi-at-si-ak) 
which means "the little race course." The white men 
have turned this into "Appawuchi," which resembles the 
real name only faintly and which means nothing. 

It was agreed that when I went to Herschel Island to do 
the trading for Sten, Kanirk and Roxy's boy would go 
with me, taking his team with the idea of possibly buying 
certain things for him. We started west along the coast 
February 15th. Nothing special happened the first day. 
The ice offshore had been crushed up into huge ridges 
by the wind and we could not travel over it but had to 



1 64 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

follow the narrow beach between cliffs two or three hun- 
dred feet high on one side and the impassable ice on the 
other. There was soft snow under the cliff in places 
where there was a lee, and here and there the rough ice 
had been shoved actually up against the cliff in such a 
way that we had great difficulty in scrambling over. Oc- 
casionally we had to use axes to hack away snags of ice 
to make a road for the sleds. 

We spent the first night in Amundsen's abandoned 
house at King Point. The next morning there was a howl- 
ing blizzard and it continued for three days. By that 
time we had eaten up all the food we had with us, for 
we had expected to reach Herschel Island in three travel- 
ing days. It was still blowing rather hard on the fourth 
morning but we had to do one of two things — turn and 
travel before the wind back to Shingle Point and get a 
fresh start, or face the wind and travel some twenty miles 
against it to Stokes Point where we knew a family of 
Eskimos were living about ten or twelve miles our side 
of Herschel Island. My companions were inclined to 
turn back, but I had a little pride in such things and 
urged that we should go on. Accordingly, we set out and 
I had my first arctic experience with a blizzard in the 
open. 

In Dakota I had seen many blizzards (and some of 
them are as bad as any in the polar regions) but there 
had been no occasion to travel against them any length 
of time, for houses or other shelters had always been avail- 
able. Dressed as we were in Dakota, we should have 
frozen to death anyway trying to walk twenty miles into 
a storm. Dressed in Eskimo clothes it is another matter. 
But although our lives were in no danger, we had diffi- 
culties of two kinds. 



TRAVELS AFTER THE SUN CAME BACK 165 

One difficulty was with the dogs. Their eyes kept get- 
ting filled with the drifting snow and caking with the 
freezing slush that resulted when the snow melted in their 
eyes. When a dog can see no longer he refuses to travel 
and commonly wants to curl up and sleep. We had to 
clean their eyes every few minutes to keep them going. 

The other trouble was with my beard. One of my 
southern ideas was that a beard would be some protection 
against freezing the face. The Eskimos had told me that 
this was the opposite of the truth, and it was partly 
thoughtlessness that I did not take their advice and shave 
clean for this journey. As it was, I had a full beard. 
Had the weather been a little colder the condition might 
not have been quite so bad. I think the temperature was 
about io° below zero and the wind perhaps forty miles 
an hour directly against us. The snow that struck my 
face melted in part and the water ran down my cheeks, 
freezing in the beard. This helped to cake the snow into 
the beard. I tried at first to keep my face clear by taking 
off my mittens and melting some of the ice off with my 
hands but I soon concluded that if I continued this my 
hands would freeze. Hands are worth a great deal more 
than faces, especially in the North, and so I kept them 
warm in my mittens, allowing my face to freeze. At first 
I kept both eyes open by clearing them occasionally with 
one of my hands but even this seemed a little risky, so 
I closed one eye and allowed the ice to form over it. 

After some seven or eight hours of travel we got to 
Stokes Point. Instead of being cold I was too warm, if 
anything. But on my face there was a mask of ice which 
I suppose must have weighed more than ten pounds. 
When I went into the overheated Eskimo house, the 
warmth of my face combined with the warmth of the 



166 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

room soon brought the mask off in one piece. Under it 
my face had been slightly frozen all the way from the 
roots of my hair down to my neck, even including the 
eyelid of the eye that had been kept closed. The freezing 
was only skin-deep and no worse than a sunburn, except 
on the chin where it had gone almost to the bone. I had 
a sore there for two or three weeks and the scar did not 
disappear for a few months. The lesson was well worth 
it, however, for I have never since worn a beard in cold 
weather, nor have I since had my face seriously frozen. 

The whole matter of keeping your face from freezing 
is to keep your hands warm so that you can use them for 
thawing purposes if your face begins to freeze. If you 
are traveling against a head wind with a temperature 
anything like 30 ° or 40 ° below zero, more or less freezing 
of the face is sure to take place. You keep making 
grimaces, for freezing is painless and you can detect it 
only by a stiffening of your chin or cheek. Occasionally 
you take one hand furtively out of the mitten and feel 
over the face to see if any part is getting stiff. If you 
find a little stiffening in the skin of the cheek or the chin 
you hold the warm hand on it for a moment until it is 
gone. 

If the weather is exceedingly bad — say 50° below zero 
with a moderately strong wind — a different method is 
used. The cut of both your outer and inner caribou skin 
coats is such that if you want to you can withdraw your 
arm from the sleeve and hold it on your bare breast inside 
of the clothing, tucking the empty sleeve into your belt to 
prevent the cold getting in that way. The neck of both 
coats is made loose and you can shove your warm hand 
up through. If any part is getting stiff you hold your 
hand over it as long as may be necessary to thaw it 



TRAVELS AFTER THE SUN CAME BACK 167 

out. Then you pull it in and hold it against your breast 
where it gets warm in a moment. 

By being careful you can see to it that the freezing is 
never more than skin-deep. A little peeling of the skin 
takes place a few days later and there may be a moderate 
burning sensation for a few hours in the evening after a 
day when you have frozen frequently. These are minor 
discomforts and, as I have said, are no more serious than 
sunburn when you become equally used to them. 

When we crossed over to the Herschel Island harbor 
the day after my freezing experience, we found not only 
a welcome at the police barracks and at Captain Leavitt's 
ship but also news of our expedition. Lemngwell and 
the Mate of the Duchess, Storkerson, had been to Her- 
schel Island in the fall and had reported that the Duchess 
was wintering safe behind Flaxman Island just as Cap- 
tain Leavitt had guessed. Lemngwell had left word for 
me that I might stay in the delta if I wanted to or come 
to Flaxman Island if I preferred. I decided to spend 
some more time to the east and proceed to Flaxman Isl- 
and in April. 

My return journey to Shingle Point was an interesting 
experience. The weather was good the first day and we 
made Stokes Point. The next day we were going to make 
the Amundsen cabin at King Point. We had scarcely 
more than started out when it began to breeze up from 
the east and to snow. The wind gradually increased until 
when we rounded Kay Point it was blowing a gale in our 
faces. We now had the usual trouble with the dogs in 
keeping their eyes free of snow. Finally the storm got 
so bad that their eyes filled as fast as we could clear 
them, and they kept curling up with their noses in their 
tails in spite of anything we could do. We had one whip 



168 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

with us, for the dog-whipping habit had come in from the 
Indians to the south enough so that some Eskimos now 
owned whips although few used them. Kanirk and the 
boy were ahead with Roxy's team and I followed with 
Sten's. Finally the dogs became so nearly unmanage- 
able that Kanirk took hold of their leading dog, dragging 
the team ahead and bothering no more with their eyes. 
The going along the beach was so rough that the sleds 
were upsetting continually. The boy tended the forward 
sled in this respect and I managed the rear one. 

We struggled along this way until my sled got a bad 
upset, or rather fell off a ledge into a low, soft place. I 
shouted to the men ahead but, of course, they could not 
hear me against the wind and they disappeared in a 
moment into the swirling snow. Eventually I got my 
sled righted but long before that my dogs had all been 
curled up snugly and now the drifting snow had nearly 
covered them from sight. I got hold of the leading dog 
and jerked on the harness until I had the team on their 
feet. While the other sled had been just in front of us 
they had struggled ahead bravely, but now when nothing 
was in sight the story was different. I got them started 
but neither they nor I could see the trail of the other 
sled which had been completely covered up by the drift, 
and I could not see ahead enough to guide them. I now 
tried to walk ahead, dragging the leading dog, but then 
the sled upset right away. At first I felt sure the Eski- 
mos would come back to help me and I struggled on for 
perhaps an hour during which time I do not think I made 
more than one or two hundred yards between the up- 
settings of the sled and the refusal of the dogs to work 
because of being blinded by the snow. 

When I realized the Eskimos were not coming back I 



TRAVELS AFTER THE SUN CAME BACK 169 

realized also that the situation was of a sort which ac- 
cording to all the books I had read should lead to tragedy. 
The Eskimo sled had been light, for they had bought 
very few things from the ship. But mine was heavy, for 
Captain Leavitt had sold me all the flour and other things 
that Sten wanted. My sled being heavy with groceries, 
the Eskimos had put on theirs all the camp gear and bed 
clothing and all the equipment. During the early part 
of the day a frying pan had fallen off their sled. I had 
picked it up and stuck it on mine, and this was the only 
implement I now had. 

I remembered that somewhere in this vicinity on the 
way west we had seen a deserted Eskimo snowhouse. 
When I could not get the dogs to move ahead farther, I 
left them and taking the frying pan with me I plodded 
into the wind searching for the snowhouse. It turned 
out to be only a few hundred yards away. 

It was an old house built in the early fall and repeated 
blizzards had cut away at the roof until a hole had been 
made by the wind. Through this hole the house had 
been packed full of snow. I did not have even a hunting 
knife big enough to use for a snow knife, so there was no 
use trying to make a new house. Furthermore, I had 
never tried to build one although I had seen Ovayuak 
build several. The only thing to do, then, was to try to 
dig out the soft snow from the interior of the house with 
my frying pan shovel. About two hours of work enabled 
me to do this sufficiently. I then went back to the sled 
and took a small piece of canvas that was on it, unhitched 
the dogs and led them to my proposed camp. While I 
was doing this a good deal of fresh snow had drifted in so 
that I had to do some more shoveling with the frying pan. 
I then dropped two of the dogs into the house with the 



170 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

idea of their furnishing me with some warmth, followed 
them in and tried to cover the hole over with the piece 
of canvas. I succeeded in this only partially and during 
the following night a good deal of snow kept sifting in. 

I was pretty tired by the struggle of the day and it 
was not long from the time the dogs and I got into the 
house until I went to sleep with one of them for a pillow. 
I slept well until morning when I began to notice that I 
was getting wet. My clothes had been pretty well filled 
with snow and then the house was overheated by myself 
and the dogs, so that I was everywhere damp and on 
parts of my body soaking wet. I feared this might be 
serious, for the clothes would become stiff as soon as I 
went into the outdoors cold. But there was nothing to do 
but to try it as soon as it was daylight. 

Shortly after the first glimmering began to show through 
the translucent snow roof I went out, hitched the dogs to 
the sled as quickly as possible, and started off. There 
was no trouble now for the weather was beautiful — clear 
skies and hard frost. About four miles of driving brought 
me in view of the Amundsen camp at King Point and I 
saw the other sled hitched up and the men ready to start. 
When they saw me coming they waited and started a fire 
to cook my breakfast. 

I learned later from the boy that they had gone ahead 
probably half a mile or so the previous evening before 
noticing that I was not following. The boy had then 
wanted to stop and go back for me but Kanirk had said 
I would doubtless come along. When they got to the 
cabin and cooked supper without my coming, the boy 
had again proposed that they go to look for me but this 
Kanirk had simply refused to do. The next morning the 
boy had wanted to go back and look for me but Kanirk 











* 








> v - aJK%*c' . ft" ~ 








' 




J 


' 


V 


- 







Sea Ice Piled Against the Coast in Winter 




Breaking Camp 



TRAVELS AFTER THE SUN CAME BACK 171 

had wanted to keep on for Shingle Point and they were 
standing arguing about this when I came in sight. 

I have never rightly understood Kanirk's position in 
this. He already had a bad reputation (as I learned 
later) by reason of having abandoned on a journey a sick 
Eskimo companion who would have frozen to death had 
he not been picked up by others who followed. His own 
statement was that he had considered it no use looking 
for me in the morning for I would undoubtedly have 
frozen to death during the night. White men usually did 
freeze to death when they were lost over night. 

The idea which the Mackenzie River Eskimos had at 
the time about the ease with which white men freeze to 
death had no doubt grown up from the frequent tragedies 
that occurred to sailors who tried to run away from the 
whaling ships. Captain Leavitt told me many such 
stories. Men brought up in cities and sailors who knew 
nothing about land travel had frequently tried to run 
away from Herschel Island to the interior of Alaska, espe- 
cially during the time of the Yukon gold excitement (be- 
tween 1899 and 1902). Commonly these men had little 
idea of which way to travel or of the distance they would 
have to go and no idea of how to take care of themselves. 
It seems unbelievable but some froze to death under clear 
skies at distances of no more than six or eight miles from 
the ship. They had sneaked away from the vessels per- 
haps about nine or ten o'clock in the evening, had stum- 
bled along through half-darkness over rough ice on the 
way towards the mainland for six or eight miles, had be- 
come tired and with clothing wet with perspiration had 
lain down to sleep, never to waken. 

Among white men in the North, such as Hudson's Bay 
Company's men and whalers, there is prevalent a super- 



172 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

stitious fear of going to sleep outdoors in cold weather. 
It is not the sleeping, however, that is dangerous to a 
tired man but rather that he does not go to sleep soon 
enough. If you exert yourself only moderately you will 
not perspire, and so long as you do not perspire your 
clothes will keep reasonably dry, at least for the first 
day or two after you start on a journey. The Eskimos 
know how to keep their clothes dry indefinitely but 
the runaway whalers did not know how to do that. This 
was not the trouble, however, but rather that they worked 
themselves into a sweat, struggled along until they were 
soaking wet and dead tired, and then finally went into a 
sleep that ended in death. 

My own practice through many years has been to lie 
down in the open and go to sleep whenever I feel like it. 
I have frequently done this on winter nights under the 
stars, with a temperature in the vicinity of 50° and 55 ° 
below zero, or as cold as it ever gets in the arctic regions. 
I find that in fifteen or twenty minutes the cold wakes 
me up. That is not much of a nap, but when I get up 
from it I feel a good deal refreshed and go on until I get 
too sleepy again, when I take a second nap. The fear of 
going to sleep in extreme cold is not only unfounded but 
is actually the cause of many deaths in the polar regions. 
Men struggle ahead and keep awake as long as they can. 
Finally exhaustion compels them to sleep. It is then 
they are in danger of freezing and never waking. 

The Eskimo sled had contained besides our food and 
camping gear a bag of my clothing. In the warmth of the 
Amundsen cabin I changed after breakfast into dry 
clothes. We reached Shingle Point easily by mid-after- 
noon. 



CHAPTER XV 

WE GO IN SEARCH OF OUR OWN EXPEDITION 

Although it still looked like winter, I considered spring 
to begin April 7th when I started to follow the coast west- 
ward in search of Flaxman Island which I had never 
seen and my own expedition which so far had been mine in 
name only. 

My companion on this trip was an Eskimo from Cape 
York on Bering Straits who had been with the whalers 
so long that everybody seemed to have forgotten his 
rightful name. Even the Eskimos called him "Cape 
York" and he introduced himself to me by that name. 

Cape York had never been farther west in winter than 
about halfway to Flaxman Island, but he had often seen 
the place from shipboard as he passed by in summertime 
aboard one or another of the whaling vessels and he 
thought he would be able to recognize the vicinity when 
we came to it. One might think that finding a ship an- 
chored behind an island would not be particularly dif- 
ficult, and neither would it be in good weather. But in 
the Arctic the weather gets more disagreeable and more 
difficult to deal with when spring approaches. 

In mid-winter it is cold in the Arctic but when you are 
dressed Eskimo-style you don't mind it. Fifty or fifty- 
five below zero is a little too cold, for if you run or exert 
yourself violently and take the air rapidly into your lungs 
in consequence, it has a sort of burning and half -stifling 
effect. Forty below is about right and on the north coast 

173 



174 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

of Canada it is not likely to be colder than that more 
than ten or twenty days in any one winter. 

It is only in the interior of a continent or large island 
a hundred miles or more from the coast that you may 
occasionally get a temperature of sixty below zero. Your 
first morning of that kind of weather is a marvelous ex- 
perience. The air is so clear that you can see three or 
four times as far as you can in any lowland in the South 
(mountain air is clear in all parts of the world). You 
can see with the bare eyes almost as well at 50° below 
as you can with opera glasses at 50 ° above. But if your 
eyesight is improved two or three times over, your hear- 
ing becomes ten times keener. I have heard distinctly at 
a mile the footfall of caribou walking quietly through 
slightly crusted snow. Firth told me that in the moun- 
tains west of Fort Macpherson he had frequently heard 
Indians chopping their firewood in camps that were ten 
miles away. 

From Christmas until April the arctic skies are clear 
most of the time and you have such experiences as I have 
just described. But when the temperature begins to rise 
towards zero Fahrenheit, the skies begin to cloud over, 
fogs are frequent, the snow storms are twice as numerous 
and the snowfall heavier than in the next worst period, 
which is the late fall. 

When Cape York and I started west we still had clear 
weather, but Captain Leavitt warned me that it was un- 
likely to continue that way and that we might miss Flax- 
man Island and the ship unless we were careful. Fear- 
ing this difficulty, he gave me as good a description of the 
topography as he could, but unfortunately he had seen it 
only from shipboard in summer. The land then has an 
appearance quite different from that of winter, and the 



IN SEARCH OF OUR OWN EXPEDITION 175 

point of view of a traveler by sled is necessarily different 
from that of a whaling captain, for the sled traveler's eyes 
are less than six feet above sea level as he follows the 
beach, but the captain gets almost a bird's-eye view from 
his masthead, more than a hundred feet above water. 

However, Captain Leavitt thought we could not miss 
Barter Island, for that is the first land west of Herschel 
Island higher than fifteen or twenty feet above sea level. 
Herschel Island is about five hundred feet high and Barter 
Island, Captain Leavitt thought, would be about a third 
as high, consisting of rolling hills where the rest of the 
coast is flat. On a clear day we could judge roughly also 
by the distance of the mountains from the seacoast. Just 
east of the boundary between Canada and Alaska at a 
point some twenty miles west of Herschel Island, they 
come nearer to the coast than at any point between the 
Mackenzie River and Cape Lisburne near Bering Straits. 
There are only six or eight miles of level prairie separat- 
ing the coast from the first foothills, and the mountains 
proper are not over fifteen miles from the sea. At the 
Alaska boundary they are twenty or more miles inland 
and as you go west they become farther and farther away 
until in the vicinity of Barter Island Captain Leavitt 
estimated them to be about thirty or thirty-five miles in- 
land. They would be at least forty miles inland from 
Flaxman Island, which is about fifty miles west of Barter 
Island. 

But the mountains would be unlikely to guide us for 
the spring fogs and snowstorms would prevent that. Our 
hope was to recognize Barter Island when we came to it. 
We would then estimate carefully our daily traveling 
distances beyond that and when we got fifty miles west 
of Barter Island we would search carefully or wait for 



176 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

clear weather. In case of clear weather Captain Leavitt 
thought there would be no difficulty in finding the Duchess 
of Bedford. He described Flaxman Island as being five 
or six miles long, a mile or two wide and in few places 
more than fifteen or twenty feet high. The masts of a 
ship anchored behind the island would, therefore, be vis- 
ible above it. 

Those unfamiliar with the north coast of Alaska might 
think that distinguishing at a distance between the main- 
land and the islands would be easy. It is difficult, 
however, for the islands, although some of them grass- 
covered, are little more than overgrown sandpits. Flax- 
man Island, for instance, is only about three miles from 
the mainland and a sledge traveler viewing it from sea- 
ward is likely to mistake it for a low promontory rather 
than a separate body of land. 

Our dog team was the poorest I have ever seen in the 
Arctic, either before or since. Captain Leavitt had seen 
nothing like it. There were only two passably good dogs 
in it, one belonging to me and one to Cape York. 

As related before, I had purchased two dogs from Sten 
in the fall but one of them had died under peculiar circum- 
stances. There had been a woman and her adopted son 
staying at Sten's house. They decided one day they 
wanted to make a trip and, as they had only one dog to 
pull a small sled with their bedding, I lent them the better 
one of mine. He was a powerful and in every way a 
good dog and had had an interesting history. 

Two years before when Captain Amundsen had been 
wintering at King William Island to the north of Hudson 
Bay there had been in Hudson Bay the ship Arctic, under 
command of Inspector Moody, of the Royal Northwest 
Mounted Police. Hearing that Amundsen was wintering 



IN SEARCH OF OUR OWN EXPEDITION 177 

in the North, Inspector Moody wanted to offer him some 
courtesy and purchased a team of the best dogs obtainable 
in that region to send to Amundsen as a present. But 
Amundsen already had all the good dogs he could use and 
was having the difficulty all northern travelers know of 
finding sufficient food for them. To show his appreci- 
ation of Inspector Moody's gift he kept one dog from the 
team but returned the others with an explanation of the 
cause. The next year Captain Amundsen had tried to 
sail west to the Pacific but had been frozen in (as we have 
explained) at King Point and had spent the winter there 
as a neighbor to Sten, for Amundsen's winter camp was 
but a few hundred yards away from the wreck of Sten's 
schooner Bonanza. The next summer when he sailed 
away Amundsen made Sten a present of a whole dog team 
which he had brought from Greenland and of this one 
dog from Hudson Bay. The Hudson Bay dog was so 
much bigger and stronger than the Greenland dogs and 
was so likely to injure them if they got into a fight, that 
Sten was glad to sell him to me although he was the best 
of all his dogs. 

So when the widow and her son wanted to make their 
trip, I loaned them The Owl — that being our name for 
the Hudson Bay dog. This was some months after my 
trip across the Mackenzie delta with Roxy and I had for- 
gotten the peculiar Eskimo point of view when it comes 
to feeding dogs. On the trip the woman and boy were 
stormbound several days at King Point and during that 
time they ran out of food. I happened to be making a 
short trip at that time. When I met them I was astounded 
to see that although their own dog was fat, mine that I 
had lent them looked like a skeleton. When I asked how 
this happened, I was told they had run out of food and 



iyS HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

that, as I had provided none for my dog, naturally they 
had stopped feeding him before they stopped feeding 
their own. 

This meeting took place at an Eskimo camp. I un- 
hitched The Owl from the widow's sled and took off his 
harness, which was made of braided hemp. I then went 
into the Eskimo house to ask for a fish to give to the dog. 
I was handed the fish at once, but when I got out with 
it I saw the last of the hempen harness disappearing 
down the dog's throat. He had been ravenously hungry, 
and some grease at some time or other had been spilled 
on the harness. This made it smell to him like food and 
he had eaten it. I knew his death was bound to follow 
unless I could make him throw it up. We poured a pint 
or more of seal oil down his throat, hoping to induce him 
to vomit. He threw up the oil sure enough, but the har- 
ness stuck in his stomach. Two days later he was suf- 
fering such agony that he had to be shot. 

This was to me a tragic experience both because I had 
been fond of the dog and because I was getting fond of 
the Eskimos as a people and did not like to find such 
disagreeable characteristics cropping out. I must say 
before leaving this subject that, although both the woman 
and Roxy were justified by a theory which the Eskimos 
well understood, in starving my dogs when they fed their 
own, the rest of the people disapproved of them for doing 
such things and both of them were thought less of by their 
countrymen after than before. 

After The Owl's death I had one fairly good dog left 
and Cape York owned a willing enough dog, but tiny. 
It was the intention that Cape York should return to 
Herschel Island after delivering me at Flaxman, and so 
we tried to borrow several other dogs for the trip. I 



IN SEARCH OF OUR OWN EXPEDITION 179 

succeeded in borrowing four but it turned out that none 
of them was worth his feed. They were small and also 
poor in flesh. One was larger than the others and looked 
better but he turned out to have fits resembling epilepsy 
with which he was seized two or three times a day. He 
used to foam at the mouth, lying in a fit for a few min- 
utes, after which he got up but was dizzy and apparently 
out of his head for an hour or so. After two or three 
hours of normal pulling he would have another fit. 

This spring journey gave me several new experiences. 
One of these was with "diffused light," which is among 
the chief annoyances of arctic travel. This trouble comes 
when the sky is uniformly clouded over and the clouds 
just thick enough so that they let through most of the 
sun's light without revealing just where the sun is. If 
the position of the sun in the sky is even faintly visible, 
then the case is not so bad, for discernible shadows will 
then appear in the lee of snowdrifts, ice snags, etc. But 
when you cannot see the sun there are no shadows. The 
snowdrifts are white and the ice snags white and there is 
nothing to enable you to distinguish between them. 

The storms of winter sculpture the snow into ridges 
which we call drifts. If you have not seen snowdrifts, 
just imagine that the surface of an ocean or a big lake 
is first ruffled by a moderate storm and then suddenly 
frozen solid so that every wave and billow retains its 
position as they do on a painted canvas. Traveling over 
such a snow surface is disagreeable enough when the sun 
is shining and gives you shadows enough in the low places 
so that you can distinguish a ridge from a trough. But 
under the conditions of "diffused light" the snow before 
you, no matter how rough in reality, looks perfectly 
smooth. And still that is hardly the word. It rather 



180 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

looks as if there were nothing there and as if you were 
stepping into space each time you lift your foot. You 
never know when you are going to step into a hole or stub 
your foot against a ridge and, consequently, you must 
walk with the caution of a blind man who cannot see the 
things he may stumble over. 

All this would not be so bad if you really had the 
strength of mind to realize that your eyes are useless. 
But you are continually trying your best to see, and the 
strain brings on the condition known as snowblindness. 
You may become "snowblind" on shipboard from the 
glare of a smooth sea or lake, and you may become snow- 
blind on a snow field when the sun is bright in the sky 
and the light is so intense that it is difficult to keep the 
eyes open. But neither of these conditions is half as bad 
as the subdued glare of diffused arctic spring light. 

One thing about snowblindness is that each time you 
have it your eyes are weakened a little and you are pre- 
disposed to a second attack. For this reason white men 
who are new in the Arctic are at first some of them com- 
paratively immune. An Eskimo who has been exposed to 
this light condition from childhood is likely to become 
snowblind before a white man or negro feels the least 
twinge in his eyes. 

This happened to Cape York when we had traveled 
something over a hundred miles west of Herschel Island 
and thought we must be approaching Barter Island. 
Captain Leavitt had given us some flour and I had se- 
cured seal oil from an Eskimo. This made the necessary 
ingredients and in the evening after camping I was fry- 
ing doughnuts when Cape York asked me whether the 
grease was not getting too hot. I assured him it was not 
and asked what made him think so. He said it seemed 



IN SEARCH OF OUR OWN EXPEDITION 181 

to him that there was smoke in the tent — for it was now 
too warm for snowhouses and we were using a tent in- 
stead. After he had looked carefully at the pan in which 
the doughnuts were simmering and had assured himself 
there was no smoke, he announced that he must be get- 
ting snowblind and said we should probably not be able 
to travel the next day. He hoped it would not be a bad 
attack; perhaps one day's delay would be all. 

But it turned out to be a bad attack. Before we had 
supper eaten the tears were beginning to run down Cape 
York's cheeks and his eyes, instead of feeling as if there 
were smoke in them, felt as if there were grains of sand 
under the eyelids. As usual, I made a long entry in my 
diary. This took me about half an hour and by that time 
my companion had begun to moan with a pain in the eye- 
balls which resembles the shooting pains of toothache. 
This was the first time I had seen snowblindness and the 
severity of it was a revelation to me. I had imagined that 
it was a kind of temporary blindness and had not realized 
that it was painful. 

That night I was awakened now and then by Cape 
York's moaning. I offered to do whatever I could but 
he said there was nothing to do but what he was doing, 
which was to crouch on all fours with his head covered 
by a blanket. The cover was necessary to keep out the 
light for it was spring now and the nights were no longer 
dark except for two or three hours around midnight. 

All the next day the pain in Cape York's eyes was un- 
abated. The first sign of improvement was that towards 
midnight he fell asleep. Next morning when I woke up 
he was cooking breakfast with his eyes protected by col- 
ored goggles which we had secured from Captain Leavitt. 
The pain was no longer intense, he said, but tears were 



1 82 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

still running from his eyes and the eyelids were swollen — 
perhaps partly because he had been rubbing them so 
much. By evening of the second day he could keep his 
eyes open within the tent, but he told me that everything 
looked double. He said that when he looked at me it 
sometimes seemed as if I had three eyes and sometimes as 
if I had four. 

The morning of the third day Cape York had gone out- 
side the tent door and came in with great excitement, 
saying there were caribou on a nearby hillside. I went 
out and sure enough there they were about a mile away. 
These were the first caribou I had seen, for the Macken- 
zie district is a fish and rabbit country with a few moose 
in the willows but ordinarily nowadays no caribou. We 
had seen caribou tracks when I was on the way with 
Roxy to Tuktuyaktok. These had been animals crossing 
from the mainland to Richard Island. On the Eskimo 
Lakes with Harrison we heard of Eskimos living two or 
three days' journey away from him who had killed a few, 
but in general that is not a caribou country either, at 
least nowadays. 

The Eskimos say that before the whalers came and 
induced the Eskimos to kill so many caribou to feed 
the ships, there used to be considerable numbers just 
east of the Mackenzie. Captain Leavitt told me that 
on the mainland just south of Herschel Island they often 
had caribou in the spring, and thirty or forty miles south 
of Herschel Island in and beyond the mountains there 
were supposed to be a good many. None had been seen 
north of the mountains this winter in that locality but 
Captain Leavitt had told me that as we traveled west 
the chances of seeing them would become greater and 
that he believed that south of Barter Island we might find 



IN SEARCH OF OUR OWN EXPEDITION 183 

some. This forecast was now coming true. Not only 
were the caribou there but they were on a hillside and, 
therefore, probably on Barter Island, for Captain Leavitt 
had said it was the first hilly country we would come to. 

I know now that I should have gone after those caribou 
myself. The Eskimos of northwestern Alaska are excel- 
lent seal hunters but they do not see any caribou unless 
they leave their own country to go southeast into the 
Kuvuk or Noatak valleys or unless they join a whaler 
and later become caribou hunters in the service of the 
ships in the Herschel Island district. I did not realize 
this fully at the time and took it for granted that Cape 
York was a good caribou hunter. I thought only of the 
condition of his eyes, but he said that they were not bad 
now and he would try it. We could not both go because 
one of us had to watch the dogs to keep them from mak- 
ing a noise. So long as one man was around the tent 
they would remain quiet, but if both of us left they would 
probably set up a howl because they were tied and could 
not follow. If they were not tied they would follow us. 
Either would have been fatal to any chance of getting 
caribou. 

I did not see how Cape York hunted the caribou, for 
before he got started from the tent they had wandered 
over the hill to the far side. In half an hour I heard 
shooting and in about an hour he came back with a long 
explanation of just why he had failed to kill anything. 
One thing was that he had miscalculated the wind and 
they had heard and perhaps winded him while he was still 
behind the cover of a hill. When he got to the top of 
the hill they were running some distance off. According 
to his account, he should have been able to kill them, 
nevertheless, had it not been that when he aimed the 



184 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

rifle he saw two rifle sights where one should have been, 
for he was still suffering the last effects of the snowblind- 
ness. The comfortable part of the story he brought back 
was that he felt sure this was Barter Island. He said 
we could soon verify that for he had heard there was a 
sandspit running west from the island on which there 
were ruins of an ancient Eskimo village. 

When we started traveling this was verified, for we 
came to the sandspit and to the ruins of several Eskimo 
houses made of earth and wood. To the south on the 
mainland we saw a house that looked as if it were in- 
habited. This turned out correct, but the people were 
off on a journey. We went into the house, for that is the 
custom of the country. As Cape York's eyes were not 
fully recovered and as I found several books and maga- 
zines to read, we decided to spend the night. There was 
also the possibility of the occupants coming home. 

Evidently the owner of this house was a white man, for 
there were books on mining, assaying and the like. Some 
of the books had on them the names of Lefnngwell and 
Mikkelsen and had evidently come from our ship. 

The second day after leaving this cabin the weather 
was thick and we walked out of a snow squall almost into 
an Eskimo camp. This was a tiny house occupied by a 
couple with an infant child. Now we learned exactly 
where we were and got information of various sorts. To 
begin with, the man whose house we had occupied two 
days before was Ned Arey. I had heard much of him 
from Captain Leavitt. Arey is of Pilgrim descent, born 
and brought up in Massachusetts. He first came to the 
Arctic as a whaler but soon became interested in mining 
and has traveled over a large part of northern Alaska, 
prospecting for gold. At first he had a good income which 



IN SEARCH OF OUR OWN EXPEDITION 185 

came to him annually from his parents in Massachusetts. 
Later this failed and he made his living from the foxes he 
trapped, for he was never very lucky with the gold. All 
this I knew from Captain Leavitt, and also that Arey 
was one of the most amiable and entertaining of men. 
We learned from these Eskimos that he was now on a 
visit to our ship at Flaxman Island. 

About the expedition we received two pieces of serious 
news. The lesser of the evils was that the ship had 
sprung a leak. As she was for the present frozen into 
six or seven feet of ice, she could not sink. Her hold was 
full of water, however, and she was expected to sink in 
the spring when the ice thawed which now held her up. 
Accordingly all her cargo had been removed to the land, 
she had been partly broken up, and from the lumber a 
house had been built ashore. 

The more serious piece of news was that Leffingwell, 
Mikkelsen and the first mate, Storker Storkerson, were 
dead. Against the advice of all the Eskimos they had 
gone away from land north over the moving sea ice. A 
week or two later one of their dogs had come back. Evi- 
dently this was the only survivor of the party. The Eski- 
mos thought that the two sleds and all the men and dogs 
had probably sunk through thin ice in trying to make a 
crossing from one solid floe to another, and that this one 
dog had wriggled free from the harness and had eventually 
made his way to land. For some days after the dog came 
ashore the Eskimos had hoped that perhaps one of the 
men would also get ashore. This hope had now been given 
up. An Eskimo might make a living for a long time by 
hunting but white men would surely die unless they got 
back to people within a few days. 

5Ve were told that the camp at Flaxman Island was now 



1 86 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

under the command of Dr. Howe and that Ned Arey 
had gone over there to give Dr. Howe the benefit of his 
long experience in the country and to make himself gen- 
erally helpful. 

The bad news inclined us all the more to hurry on to 
Flaxman Island. It was late in the day, however, so we 
slept over night. The next morning we started early 
and made the remaining twenty miles to Flaxman Island 
by midafternoon. On arrival at the camp we found the 
physical conditions as described by the Eskimos. The 
ship had been dismantled and a house had been built on 
shore where the party were now living under command 
of Dr. George P. Howe, of Boston, Massachusetts, a 
Harvard man whom I had known in Cambridge. He had 
three white men and there were some Eskimos helping 
about the camp. As a visitor we found Ned Arey with 
his Eskimo wife and family. 

But we got a new story as to the death of the three 
officers. Dr. Howe did not think they were dead. The 
Eskimos had from the first believed that any journey 
out over the sea ice would be suicidal. The start had 
been made under ordinary ice exploring conditions, but 
the party had not been gone more than a few days when 
the Eskimos already knew they were dead. Later when 
a dog came ashore this confirmed them in the belief. Dr. 
Howe thought everything was all right. The intention of 
the ice party had been to stay away about two months. 
The time was not quite up and they might come back any 
day. 

Ned Arey's opinion was intermediate between that of 
the Eskimos and of Dr. Howe. He thought that the party 
might have survived a certain length of time out on the 
ice but that they had now been gone too long and the 



IN SEARCH OF OUR OWN EXPEDITION 187 

chance of their safety was small. Furthermore, he con- 
sidered that the arrival of the dog was a fairly conclusive 
evidence of tragedy. 

On the whole my own opinion was a little more opti- 
mistic than even that of Dr. Howe, for I had gathered 
from the polar books I had read that ice travel was pos- 
sible, although dangerous, and could not see why it should 
be much worse to the north of Alaska than in other parts 
of the world. I have since learned that it is somewhat 
more dangerous than the average in this locality, for the 
currents are specially violent and the ice, in consequence, 
particularly treacherous. Even had I known this, I 
should still have expected the party to come back, for 
they had been outfitted with provisions ample for a time 
somewhat longer than their absence had as yet 
amounted to. 

Dr. Howe's opinion was that our expedition would be 
over that summer. The Duchess would probably sink in 
the spring and we would have to take passage with whal- 
ing ships to the outside world. This was a great disap- 
pointment to him, but even more disappointing to me, 
for my heart had been set upon visiting the Victoria Isl- 
and Eskimos. 

When Leffingwell had first proposed to me in Chicago 
that I go with him to Victoria Island the prospect had 
seemed attractive. It is an island much bigger than 
England. More than half a century before our time some 
British explorers had examined a considerable part of 
the coast and had met some Eskimos in two or three 
places. It seemed probable that these explorers had not 
seen more than a small fraction of the native population. 
Furthermore, most of the Eskimos actually seen by the 
explorers had probably died since then. It would be a 



188 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

fascinating thing to visit these people, the ancestors of 
most of whom had never seen a white man and who them- 
selves certainly never had. If there were a few living 
who remembered from their childhood the days of the 
early explorers this would make the case still more inter- 
esting. Most thrilling of all was the possibility that we 
might find some old man who could give us from memory 
a solution of what to the world of Europeans is still the 
mystery of the fate of Sir John Franklin's men, whose 
two ships had been set fast in the ice just to the east of 
Victoria Island. All of his men were supposed to have 
died there or to the southeast but it was possible that 
some of them came ashore in Victoria Island. They 
might even have lived there for a few years, if not in- 
definitely. 

When I had met Captain Klinkenberg at Herschel 
Island the past summer my interest had been increased. 
He had actually seen the Victoria Island people, but pre- 
sumably only a small fraction of them. He had described 
them as having copper weapons where other primitive 
Eskimos usually have stone. But mysterious above every- 
thing, was his information that a certain small percentage 
of them differed from the rest and differed from the Alaska 
Eskimos Klinkenberg knew so well, in having a complex- 
ion which made them resemble Europeans. He had said 
that some of them had blue eyes and light hair. 

Dr. Howe and I talked much about this fascinating 
problem and both said we would give anything to be able 
to go there. We agreed, however, that the best way of 
getting there would probably be to leave the country for 
now and to organize a new expedition later. All our plans 
had hinged on the Duchess of Bedford and when she was 
sunk we would have to make a new start. 



IN SEARCH OF OUR OWN EXPEDITION 189 

This problem of the strange Eskimos occupied my mind 
continually more and more as time passed. We knew 
that no whalers had been there, for the first whalers in 
the western Arctic had come in to Herschel Island only 
in 1889 and the captains of most of those early ships 
were still captains in the present fleet. I had learned 
from them that no whaler had ever gone ashore in Victoria 
Island, except that Captain Cottle had once landed a 
small party of Alaska Eskimos to pursue some caribou 
they saw from shipboard. The caribou had been killed 
and the Eskimos had come aboard with the meat without 
reporting having seen even signs of people. It had been 
the common whaler belief that Victoria Island, although 
formerly inhabited by Eskimos, was now uninhabited, 
and Klinkenberg's discovery had, therefore, seemed even 
more remarkable to them than it had to me. Whalers 
have never reached Victoria Island from the east side, as 
I knew in advance and as I verified later by inquiries 
from Captain George Comer, a veteran of the eastern 
whaling fleet, who still lives in Connecticut. 

I gradually made up my mind to solve sometime and 
somehow the mystery of the white Eskimos of Victoria 
Island. The opportunity did not come for three years. 



CHAPTER XVI 

A SPRING JOURNEY IN AN ESKIMO SKIN BOAT 

At Flaxman Island I found a well-stocked library and the 
leisure to write and to think. After an active winter un- 
der strange circumstances, the change was welcome. The 
shelves were full of scientific books. I read Osier's 
"Practice of Medicine," fascinating as a novel, and Cham- 
berlain and Salisbury's three-volume geology, which has 
for its theme the greatest romance of all the romances — 
the ancestry, birth and development of our world. Then 
there were books labeled romances, such as the marvel 
stories of H. G. Wells. There were whole shelves of Tol- 
stoi and of the English classics. Between reading these 
I wrote long dissertations on what I had seen and heard 
during the winter and on what I thought about it all. 

But under the stimulation of an arctic climate inactivity 
soon palls upon one who has tasted the wine of action. 
I had not been at Flaxman Island more than a week when 
I proposed to Dr. Howe, who was in command for the 
time being, that he outfit me for a trip back to Herschel 
Island. He did this and I made the journey, but as it 
was uneventful I shall tell nothing about it. 

During my absence at Herschel Island the men whom 
the Eskimos had reported dead came home all safe from 
the ice. They had made a fine exploration a hundred 
miles north from Alaska. The theory upon which they 
started was that the ocean would be shallow and islands 
would, therefore, probably be found rising here and there 

190 



SPRING JOURNEY IN A SKIN BOAT 191 

from the sea bottom, or else a large land. So sure did 
they feel about the shallowness of the ocean that, al- 
though they intended to take soundings wherever they 
went, they carried a line of only 2,000 feet, expecting it 
to reach bottom whenever desired. This was so far from 
being true that they had gone only about thirty miles 
from land when they came to where the sea floor settled 
rapidly down to abysmal depths. This was taken to 
mean that the probability of land beyond was small. 
They, nevertheless, kept on for some distance. But the 
ice was in rapid motion and everything was more difficult 
than they had expected, so they presently turned back 
to survey some more of the "continental shelf," as we 
call the beginning of the steep slope where the shoal 
waters of the coastline meet the deeps of the ocean proper. 
The location of this slope is considered a matter of great 
scientific importance. 

While engaged in determining the continental shelf the 
party were struck by an easterly gale which carried the 
ice they were on so swiftly to the westward that they 
were in danger of being taken into the open sea beyond 
Point Barrow. A calm came just in time and they were 
able to get across from the moving floes to the landfast 
ice to the south of them, and thence ashore. 

When I got back to Flaxman Island Leffingwell and 
Mikkelsen confirmed what Dr. Howe had conjectured — 
that the expedition was practically over. Leffingwell 
would spend another year in the vicinity, for he was a 
geologist by training and wanted to study the mountains 
to the south. Mikkelsen had first thought of making a 
journey eastward in a small boat with only Storkerson 
as a companion but he later gave that up. 

At Flaxman Island I now awaited eagerly the coming 



192 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

of my first arctic summer. The winter I had liked very 
well. It had resembled in general the twenty winters 
I have lived in Dakota. The cold had been no more in- 
tense than the Dakota cold although somewhat more uni- 
form and lasting about two months longer. The storms 
had been rather milder than the worst Dakota blizzards. 
The long periods of clear and cold weather had been more 
exhilarating than any climate I had known before. 

But although the winter had been pleasant, I looked 
with the keenest interest toward the coming of spring. 
The beginnings of spring were disappointing. The latter 
part of April resembled January in Scotland or Nebraska, 
and was rather disagreeable. May was worse. It re- 
sembled the worst kind of January you get in the south 
of England or in Missouri. The first rain came on the 
6th of May. 

One of the pleasant things about the North is that the 
winter snow is perfectly dry. But in May the northern 
snow has the sogginess familiar in southern countries and 
makes your feet wet unless you wear water boots. We 
did commence wearing the Eskimo style seal skin water 
boots, which are lighter and in every way better than 
any other water boots known to me. But although they 
are good water boots for summer, they are cold footgear 
for spring, for the chill of the damp snow outside of them 
penetrates through and produces the same sort of con- 
densation on the inside that you get from wearing rubber 
boots wading in cold water. Although perfectly water- 
proof, neither rubber boots nor seal skin boots can keep 
your feet dry, for they become wet inside with the con- 
densation of the body moisture. You can travel through 
six months of winter with feet dry every day inside deer 
skin boots that are not waterproof, but you become wet 



SPRING JOURNEY IN A SKIN BOAT 193 

in six hours of May travel though your boots be water- 
tight. 

At Herschel Island the mountains are only twenty or 
thirty miles to the south but at Flaxman Island they are 
ten or fifteen miles farther away. The spring heat takes 
effect sooner on the mountain slopes than on the level 
prairie and, accordingly, the more easterly rivers opened 
earlier. On my last trip east I found the Firth River 
open the 10th of May and the water from it spreading 
in a wide fan over many square miles of sea ice just 
west of Herschel Island. The Kugruak River at Flax- 
man Island did not open till the middle of May. The 
water from such a river flows several miles out on the ice, 
perhaps six or eight, and finally meets a tide crack through 
which it can join the sea beneath. These tide cracks 
are formed where the shore ice that lies solidly on the 
bottom meets the ice farther out that lies over deeper 
water and rises and falls with the tides. These cracks 
are kept open all winter by the ice movement and are 
ready to receive the river water when the spring freshets 
bring it to the ocean. 

Most travelers of the polar regions have remarked how 
suddenly spring comes. It does come more rapidly than 
in more southerly countries, but gradually nevertheless. 

There are many signs of coming spring besides the in- 
creasing warmth that we dislike because it is accom- 
panied by increasing cloudiness and a heavier and heavier 
snowfall. The birds are one of these signs. A few kinds 
have been there all winter — ptarmigan by the thousand, 
hawks, owls and ravens by the dozen. The first snow 
buntings appear on the coast early in April. If you were 
far out on the sea ice where it is in rapid movement with 
much open water between the cakes, you would have the 



194 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

seagulls as early as the snow buntings come to the coast. 
But near land the gulls do not appear until about the 
same time as the geese, and that would be about the same 
time as the first rivers break up, or anywhere between 
the first and middle of May. There are half a dozen 
different kinds of geese and a little later there are dozens 
of kinds of ducks, including four kinds of eider ducks. 
A very few cranes and a somewhat larger number of 
swans come about the same time as the ducks, and so do 
the loons. About a hundred varieties of smaller birds 
come, too, some of them early and others later — plovers, 
snipes, sandpipers, etc. 

In the fall at Shingle Point I had seen great rejoicing 
among the children when the first snow fell and when 
the first ice came. Now at Flaxman Island there was 
also rejoicing among the people. They like to see summer 
change to fall but they also like to see winter change to 
spring, although the joy seemed to me more exuberant 
in the fall than in the spring. One reason why nobody 
in the North can wholly like the summer is that it makes 
travel so difficult. In winter all the rivers and lakes are 
frozen over and you can walk or travel by dog sled with- 
out interruption in any direction. In the summer time 
you cannot use sledges at all; nor could wagons be used 
for there are no roads, the ground is rough, and there is 
sticky mud in many places. In summer the dogs can be 
used for carrying packs only and, as their legs are short, 
they cannot be trusted to carry anything that must be 
kept dry, for they will accidentally drag their packs 
through water in crossing streams. In hot weather they 
intentionally lie down in streams and in ponds to cool 
off, thus making their loads wet. The people themselves 
are, accordingly, the chief beasts of burden in summer. 



SPRING JOURNEY IN A SKIN BOAT 195 

This makes travel much less pleasant and much slower 
than in winter. 

Of course, the same summer heat that makes overland 
travel difficult makes boat travel possible, and the Eski- 
mos take advantage of that. The spring is, therefore, 
the time for making boats and putting boats in order. 
In 1906-07 a good many of the Eskimos owned whale- 
boats purchased from the ships. These boats are about 
28 feet or 30 feet long, will carry a ton of freight and 
sail beautifully, but they are fragile, difficult to keep in 
repair and not very seaworthy when heavily loaded. The 
big Eskimo skin-boat called umiak is for most purposes 
far better. 

When the white whalers first came to the north coast 
of Alaska they had great contempt for the driftwood on 
the beaches and brought with them lumber which they 
thought would be preferable for use in making the frames 
of the Eskimo umiaks. At first the Eskimos were talked 
into this, but they soon gave it up for they found that a 
frame made of spruce was lighter and stronger for any 
given dimension than a frame made of the commercial 
lumber. Thus the Eskimos found out for themselves 
what many white men never knew until the World War 
came with its demand for spruce as framework for air- 
planes. The same quality that makes spruce suitable for 
airplane frames makes it suitable for the frames of the 
umiaks. 

The standard size umiak is designed to be covered with 
the skins of seven bearded seals and is from thirty to 
thirty-five feet long. The boat is flat-bottomed, or roughly 
dory shaped. 

The bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus) that furnish 
skins for the covers weigh from six to eight hundred 



196 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

pounds. They have been killed sometime during the win- 
ter or previous summer. A month or two before it is time 
to make the skin-boats, the hides are put into tubs or bags 
and kept in some warm place until all the hair rots off. 
At the same time that the hair is scraped off one side the 
fat is scraped off the other side of the skin. The women 
then sew the hides together with a double seam. The 
thread is braided caribou sinew and has the property of 
swelling when it gets wet. The careful sewing by the 
women and the swelling of the sinew together produce the 
only waterproof seam that is known to be made by any 
people, European or other. This is the same seam they 
sew in making their seal skin water boots. 

The seams of the commercial leather hunting boots sold 
in our sportsmen's outfitting stores are generally made 
waterproof by rubbing grease into them. A boot seam 
made by an Eskimo woman does not need any water- 
proofing with grease and she will consider it an insult 
if she sees any one rubbing grease on the seams of boots 
she has made, the implication being that you do not trust 
her sewing. In the case of the umiaks, however, it is 
the custom to rub grease on the seams just before launch- 
ing if the boats are dry at the time. When once water- 
soaked they never leak. 

The seal skin is sewed in the beginning so as to fit 
the boat frame, but only roughly. It is then stretched 
and lashed on the frame in such a way as to make it fit 
tightly. When it dries it is as tight as a drum. 

An umiak big enough to carry twenty men will weigh 
only four or five hundred pounds. Two stout men, one 
at each end, can carry it, and four men can carry it 
easily. In the spring the Eskimos often put their umiaks 
on low sledges, then put their household gear inside the 




An Umiak and Crew — North Coast of Alaska 




The Break-up of the Sea Ice in Spring 



SPRING JOURNEY IN A SKIN BOAT 197 

umiak and commence their spring journey (if it is going 
to be a long one) several weeks before the ice on the 
rivers or ocean breaks up. They travel along until the 
water from the coastal rivers floods the ice. At first this 
water makes travel impossible, for it soaks into the snow 
that is on the ice and converts it into a foot or two of 
slush. Two or three weeks later holes will have opened 
all over the ice, the water will have drained off and then 
you can travel by sled for two or three more weeks until 
the ice finally breaks up completely under the heat of 
the sun and the influence of the winds and currents. 
Then begins the boat travel proper. This may be by any 
of three methods. 

In traveling up river, "tracking" is ordinarily employed. 
A long rope is fastened to the mast of the boat three or 
four feet up and a dog team is hitched to the other end 
of the rope. One man walks along the river bank ahead 
of the dogs and the rest of the party ride in the boat, one 
of them acting as steersman. By this method you can 
travel upstream, even against a strong current, with a 
speed of from two to four miles an hour. When you are 
going down stream or traveling on a lake or on the ocean 
in calm weather, you can use either paddles or oars. As 
a matter of fact, both are frequently in use at the same 
time. In Greenland the men are said to have a prejudice 
against oars, only women using them. But in Alaska 
either men or women may use oars and either may use 
paddles. 

The most serious defect of the umiak is that it has no 
keel and will not sail into the wind. But if you have a 
side wind or a fair wind it sails very well with a leg-of- 
mutton or any other type of ordinary boat sail. 

In addition to its lightness and the ease with which 



198 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

it can be carried on the shoulders of men over a portage 
or freighted by dogs on a sled, the umiak has many other 
peculiar advantages. For one thing, the hides it is made 
of are so exceedingly tough that you can sail with a speed 
of four or five miles an hour into a piece of ice as solid 
as a rock with little danger of serious injury. You may 
break one of the ribs of the boat but that will merely make 
a little dent in the side of your craft and can be fixed 
whenever you like. If you tear a hole in the boat it can 
be readily patched up by the Eskimo women with their 
needles. Another great advantage is the ease of landing. 
You can land on any beach except among actual rocks 
even in fairly bad weather. This is partly because the 
boat is so light that it draws very little water and partly 
because the bottom is flat. The light draft is an especial 
advantage in river travel. A whaleboat carrying a ton 
of freight will draw about eighteen inches where an umiak 
carrying the same amount of freight would not draw more 
than eight or ten inches. 

In some ways an even better boat than the umiak is 
the kayak. This has the outlines of a racing shell. The 
frame is made of light wood and whalebone. The entire 
craft is closed in so that the waves can dash over it with- 
out entering. In the old days the Eskimos used to go in 
waterproof shirts that were fastened tight around the neck 
of the wearer, around his wrists and around the mouth of 
the kayak in such a way that even if it capsized no water 
could get into the boat. A good boatman would be able 
to right himself even in fairly heavy weather. For this 
reason the seal hunting Eskimos go out on the ocean in 
summer weather where no other craft of the same size 
could possibly live. A special use of the kayak is in 
spearing caribou when they are swimming rivers or lakes. 



SPRING JOURNEY IN A SKIN BOAT 199 

The season of spring, while the birds are becoming more 
numerous day by day and while the snow is slowly disap- 
pearing, is one of great activity among the Eskimos in 
getting their boats ready for summer travel. Either be- 
fore the ice breaks or else just after it does they move 
from their winter camps to some good fishing locality. 
These are places where the water is muddy so that the 
fish cannot see the nets in the perpetual summer daylight. 

On the north coast of Alaska there are about two 
months when the sun does not set at night. The midnight 
sun comes before the snow is entirely gone from the 
prairie and the snow does not come back until long after 
the sun has begun to set at night. At Flaxman Island 
where we had the ice-filled ocean outside of us and about 
three miles of cold water between us and the mainland, 
the weather never became very hot, but some parties who 
went inland reported that up towards the mountains it 
was on an average more than twenty degrees warmer 
than we had it on the island. This meant that when we 
were just comfortable at Flaxman Island at a temperature 
of 55 or 65°, people in towards the mountains were 
sweltering at from 75 ° to 85 °, which is very hot indeed up 
there, for the air is about as humid as air can be, and 
there is little relief from the heat at night for the sun 
does not set. 

With the increasing heat came swarms of mosquitoes. 
We have already described how bad they are on the Mac- 
kenzie. They were not very bad on Flaxman Island be- 
cause we had cool breezes from the sea continually, but 
ten or fifteen miles inland they were just as bad as they 
are anywhere on the Mackenzie River or as they are any- 
where in the world. 

Besides mosquitoes, there are many other kinds of fly- 



200 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

ing insects — bumblebees, butterflies, dragonflies, horse- 
flies, blue-bottles, and the like. There are also many 
kinds of beetles, worms and other crawling things. This 
rich insect life corresponds to the rich vegetation of the 
prairie. It seems to me that in most places, prairie is 
the best general name for the arctic grasslands, but in 
many places you would speak of them rather as meadow. 
There are also patches here and there where mosses and 
lichens prevail, so that the name of neither prairie nor 
meadow fits exactly. I never speak of "tundra," for that 
word is misleading because it conveys a sense of barren- 
ness to the average reader. In many places there are 
acres and acres where flowers of one kind or another form 
a veritable carpet. There are not likely to be in any 
given locality more than a hundred or so different kinds 
of flowering plants, but the individual flowering plants 
are numerous and the flowers are brilliant in color. 

It was not till June that it began to rain to any con- 
siderable extent. That summer we had only one heavy 
thunder shower. 

Our plans had been made to leave the country this year 
and Captain Mikkelsen decided we would go out by way 
of Point Barrow. On the 14th of July we started west 
along the coast in two boats, a wooden sailing boat be- 
longing to the Duchess and an umiak belonging to a local 
Eskimo. 

I found it a delightful adventure sailing along an un- 
known coast with a fair wind, by the light of the mid- 
night sun. Occasionally we came to Eskimo encamp- 
ments and frequently we went ashore to hunt geese, eider 
ducks or other birds. We saw no caribou and the Eski- 
mos told us they were not likely to be found near the 
coast at this time of year. It is a belief common among 



SPRING JOURNEY IN A SKIN BOAT 201 

those who write about caribou that in the spring and 
early summer they come down to the sea to avoid the mos- 
quitoes. This is a complete misunderstanding, so far as 
my observation goes. If they do come down to the coast, 
it is usually in the early spring, a month or two before 
the mosquitoes arrive. During the height of the mosquito 
season, as the Eskimos told us, it is only rarely that bands 
come to the coast and you usually have to go thirty or 
forty miles inland before you find caribou in any numbers. 
In September after the mosquitoes are gone you are far 
more likely to find them near the sea. It appears, then, 
that the caribou do not come to the ocean because of the 
mosquitoes and that their movements are determined by 
entirely other causes — probably the lack of preferred 
foods, the change in the palatability of certain grasses as 
they become ripe in autumn, or by the direction of the 
wind. Caribou usually travel against the wind. 

We had proceeded without incident as far west as the 
eastern edge of the Colville delta when an accident hap- 
pened that changed all our plans. Storkerson was playing 
with a rifle and shot himself through the foot. After 
preliminary attention to the wound, Dr. Howe gave it as 
his opinion that Storkerson should be taken back to Flax^ 
man Island immediately, for he thought that trouble with 
the wound might develop and that an operation might 
be necessary. He had taken with him an emergency kit 
but had left behind at Flaxman Island his anesthetics and 
many of his instruments, and did not feel that he could 
attend to Storkerson properly elsewhere. To make this 
decision was no great hardship for most of us, for it meant 
only that we would go by whaler from Flaxman Island to 
Point Barrow to reach the revenue cutter instead of get- 
ting there a few weeks earlier by means of small boats. 



202 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

I don't think any of the men worried much about the 
accident except insofar as they were sorry for Storkerson. 
As for me, I was delighted with one aspect of the situa- 
tion, for the Eskimos had told me that in prehistoric 
times (before the memory of the fathers of the old men 
living) there had been a big Eskimo settlement on one 
of the Jones Islands which lay in a row parallel to the 
coast a few miles offshore from where the accident oc- 
curred. This island was a little bigger than Flaxman. 
I say was, designedly; for it and all the other islands are 
growing smaller year by year. It seems the north coast 
of Alaska is sinking gradually. So long as the sea ice 
remains in winter and spring, nothing happens to the in- 
jury of the islands. But when the ice goes away, as it 
does nearly every summer, and when a gale comes from 
the open sea, the waves will undermine the cliffs of the 
islands at a great rate, so that the coastline sometimes 
recedes as much as a hundred yards in a single summer. 
When the early whalers came to the north coast of 
Alaska, Flaxman Island was probably some eight or ten 
miles long. It is now no more than half that long and 
less than half as wide as it used to be. The Eskimos said 
that similarly the ocean was rapidly cutting away the 
sites of the villages on the Jones Islands and that all sorts 
of ancient implements and other relics were being washed 
away by the sea. 

It was, accordingly, decided that while Storkerson and 
the rest of the party returned as fast as they could to 
Flaxman Island, I should remain on the Jones Islands 
with an Eskimo companion and a sailor, investigating 
these ancient ruins until a whaling ship came along to 
pick us up. 

The island containing the house ruins was a low, roll- 



SPRING JOURNEY IN A SKIN BOAT 203 

ing prairie similar to Flaxman Island. There was a great 
abundance of driftwood on the north coast and we erected 
a comfortable camp near the ruins. As I had been told, 
the sea was cutting this island and it appeared as if half 
the village site was already gone. I found awash on the 
beach a number of carvings of bone and ivory and a 
number of weapons and implements of bone and wood. 
These differed in some respects but not fundamentally 
from those that were in use by the Eskimos when the 
whites first came to the country. The houses had all 
fallen and looked superficially merely like so many 
mounds. I found on investigation that the ground plan 
had been similar to that of the houses now in use along 
the coast. In my opinion this village was inhabited no 
more than two or three centuries ago. 

I was enjoying myself thoroughly, both because I was 
discovering things of scientific interest and because I was 
having a good time hunting and merely living in this 
delightful place. It was rather a disappointment for me 
than otherwise when on the 25th of July the first of the 
whaling ships came in sight from the west. We struck 
camp hurriedly, loaded our gear and our trophies into the 
boat and paddled out to meet the ship. It turned out to 
be the steam whaler Belvedere, owned at San Francisco 
but under command of Captain Stephen F. Cottle of Mas- 
sachusetts (Martha's Vineyard, I think). Mrs. Cottle 
was with him. They received me hospitably and gave me 
fruits and vegetables and various civilized foods for which 
I had been hankering greatly. 

My experience since has shown that when you have 
been without potatoes and apples for a year you are so 
hungry for them that a boiled potato makes a banquet 
and an apple is delicious beyond your vocabulary to ex- 



204 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

press. But when you have been without these things for 
five or six years, as happened to me later, you not only 
cease to long for them but actually find them much less 
pleasant when you first come back to them than you 
would if you had been eating them every day. If you 
went without fruits and vegetables for ten years at a time, 
you might imagine for the whole ten years that you were 
longing for them. But if, like me, you first go without 
them for a year and later for two years and eventually 
for five years, you find that a total of ten years is ample 
to cure you of all your hankering. It goes even farther 
than that. I used to be almost a vegetarian by taste. At 
the end of ten years in the polar regions I much preferred 
a meal where both fruits and vegetables were completely 
absent and meat the only food. 

We sailed pleasantly with the Belvedere to Flaxman 
Island where we took aboard Captain Mikkelsen. We 
then continued to Herschel Island where we arrived July 
27th, which was up to that time the earliest date that a 
ship had ever arrived there from the "outside world." 



CHAPTER XVII 

A RACE OVER THE ARCTIC MOUNTAINS IN SUMMER 

When we got to Herschel Island we heard news that 
worried both Captain Mikkelsen and me, although for 
different reasons. I have mentioned in the preceding 
chapter that after first getting to Flaxman Island I made 
a hurried trip back to Herschel Island for a conference 
with Captain Leavitt. At that time I had said to the 
captain and to some of his officers that the Eskimos 
around Flaxman Island believed the ice exploratory party 
— Leffingwell, Mikkelsen and Storkerson — to have lost 
their lives. We had discussed this a good deal. Captain 
Leavitt had inclined to the view that the ice party were 
safe but most of his officers and all the Herschel Island 
Eskimos had agreed with the Flaxman Island Eskimos 
that they were undoubtedly dead. During the spring 
several boats had gone from Herschel up to Macpherson 
to meet the Mackenzie River steamer, Wrigley. These 
people had paid no attention to Captain Leavitt's minor- 
ity view that the ice party were safe and had reported 
the death of Leffingwell, Mikkelsen and Storkerson. The 
Wrigley had left Macpherson about the middle of July, 
carrying the news of the supposed tragedy. The bearers 
of this report would arrive at the telegraph station at 
Athabasca Landing probably between the 5 th and 10th 
of September, and the news of another polar tragedy 
would be flashed to the world. When sent out this news 
would have the weight of the authority of Mr. Harrison, 
who was one of the outbound passengers and who was 

20s 



206 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

said to have been as convinced as the rest at Macpherson 
that the ice party had lost their lives. 

What concerned me particularly in this situation was 
that the story would be published on my authority, it 
having been said at Macpherson that I had brought to 
Herschel Island the news of the death of the three men. 
What worried Captain Mikkelsen especially was that he 
had an invalid mother who he feared might possibly die 
of the shock of reading in the morning paper the definite 
announcement of the death of her son. Captain Mikkel- 
sen felt almost equal concern about the parents of Mr. 
Leffingwell and about several other near relatives of the 
three reported dead. 

Captain Mikkelsen took counsel with the whaling cap- 
tains in the harbor and with the police at the barracks 
but was told that there was little chance of overtaking 
this bad news. A pursuit up* the Mackenzie under a 
month's handicap was unthinkable. The alternative was 
a journey over the mountains to the United States Gov- 
ernment wireless station at Eagle City. If this were tried 
failure was considered probable by some and certain by 
others. 

Previous to this Captain Mikkelsen and I had talked 
a good deal about the possibility of my remaining with 
him another year to continue the exploration north of 
Alaska. I had considered still more definitely the pos- 
sibility of staying with Leffingwell and helping him with 
his geological survey of the Endicott Mountains to the 
south of Flaxman Island. Had Leffingwell and Mik- 
kelsen been able to agree on cooperating at either of 
these enterprises, I should doubtless have stayed with 
them. But as one had his heart set on the mountains 
and the other on the sea ice I could not please one with- 



OVER THE ARCTIC MOUNTAINS 207 

out displeasing the other, so I thought it better on the 
whole to sever my connections with their expedition and 
to try to organize one of my own the following year. 
My heart was neither in the mountains nor on the sea 
ice but rather in the mystery of the strange people with 
blond faces and copper weapons whom Klinkenberg had 
reported from Victoria Island. 

Captain Mikkelsen may have realized already that I 
would probably not accept his offer to stay and help him 
another year with exploring, or it may have been that in 
his anxiety for his mother and for the relatives and 
friends of Lemngwell and Storkerson he had forgotten 
temporarily the plans he had been discussing with me. 
At any rate, he came to me and with no reference to 
what might be done in the North if I stayed another 
year, he asked if I would undertake the forlorn hope of 
outspeeding the bad news now on its way up the Mac- 
kenzie by journeying south across the mountains to the 
Yukon with the hope of getting to the wireless station at 
Eagle City before Harrison got to the regular telegraph at 
Athabasca Landing. He said this would have to be done 
by me or no one, for I had greater experience in over- 
land travel than any one else at Herschel Island. Fur- 
thermore, all of the others were in such circumstances 
that they could not very well consider going. Mikkelsen 
could not try it himself, for he would have to return to 
Flaxman Island to close up the affairs of the expedition. 
It was now the plan that all of the expedition except 
Leffingwell would take passage west with an outgoing 
whaler in September, connecting with the United States 
revenue cutter at Point Barrow, or possibly in Nome or 
Unalaska. Lemngwell alone would remain at Flaxman 
Island for the purpose of his geological studies. 



208 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

It took me but a few minutes to decide to try it. The 
decision once made there was no time to be lost. A 
whaleboat belonging to the Mounted Police and manned 
by a crew of three Macpherson Indians was now in the 
Herschel Island harbor. The police had intended to send 
the boat to Macpherson in a few days anyway, and now 
they said it might as well start in a few hours. It did 
not take us even a few hours to get ready; we were 
under sail inside of two hours, speeding eastward with 
a fair wind. 

A whaleboat sails beautifully when well handled and 
one of the Indians was a fair boatman. The breeze 
slackened gradually, however, and it took us eighteen 
hours to reach King Point, a distance of thirty-five miles. 
I was for taking turns sleeping on the boat and keeping 
on but the Indians pretended to know that by mid- 
forenoon there would be a fair breeze. Accordingly, we 
camped beside the wreck of the Bonanza shortly after 
midnight and slept till nine o'clock. 

I had felt sure when we went into camp that the Indian 
forecast of a breeze was based on nothing more substan- 
tial than the desire to sleep soundly on shore. But a 
breeze did come and with it we made the mouth of the 
Mackenzie and got some distance up stream. After this 
the Indians worked as hard as any one could desire. We 
were lucky in having a sailing wind fully half the time. 
When it dropped calm or when there was a head wind 
we got out our tracking line. One man remained in the 
boat to steer it and the other three of us walked along 
the river bank, pulling on the tracking line. Thus 
alternately sailing and tracking we reached Macpherson 
August 1 2 th, breaking the record in summer travel from 
Herschel Island to Fort Macpherson. We had made the 




We Sailed Up the Mackenzie Delta to Macpherson 





> 




v,,J», .:■ ;•.,. -. ;,'■•. ' •;';- 


UP^ - 


HHHHHPiFPII §v* 





Porcupine River in Early Spring 



OVER THE ARCTIC MOUNTAINS 209 

two hundred and fifty miles in a few hours over three 
days, which was about two days better time than any 
one else was known to have made. 

At Herschel Island I had considered the possibility of 
walking straight south over the mountains and I should 
have tried this had there been any natives available to 
go with me. I am writing this story, from memory and 
notes, fifteen years later and with ten years of arctic 
experience to my advantage. It now seems silly to me 
that I did not go straight south from Herschel Island 
over the mountains alone. With nothing heavier to carry 
than a message, a man needs no companion for a 
journey of one or two hundred miles through uninhabited 
country. Those are my ideas now, but I did not have 
them then nor did it seem to occur to any one who was 
then at Herschel Island that a man unaccompanied could 
safely make such a journey. 

I had decided to go by way of Macpherson because 
the police had assured me that I would have no trouble 
in getting Indians to help me across the mountains from 
there. I now took the case to Firth and he said there 
should not be any great difficulty about it, although the 
arrangements could have been more easily made had I 
been there two weeks earlier while large numbers of 
Indians were at the Fort for their summer trading. 
There were no good men available now and I would have 
to take what I could get. He thought it could be man- 
aged somehow. 

It took only a few hours to negotiate with the Indians 
and to make all arrangements. During that time Firth 
gave me valuable information and advice. He had him- 
self been in that country for more than thirty years, sta- 
tioned not always at Macpherson but sometimes at La 



210 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

Pierre's House on the Bell River to the west, or at 
Rampart House on the Porcupine to the southwest. He 
knew the mountains between thoroughly. There were 
two ways open: One was to get a canoe, go a few miles 
down the Peel River to the mouth of the Rat River and 
then up the Rat about three days' journey, paddling, 
poling and tracking the canoe. We would eventually 
come to a portage over which the canoe could be car- 
ried to the Bell River. The men who accompanied me 
would then return on foot and I would paddle the canoe 
down the Bell and Porcupine to the Yukon. But this 
canoe route was hardly open to me because there were 
no good canoes for sale just now at Macpherson. That 
practically limited us to the "portage route." 

The portage route was a footpath leading about eighty 
miles west over the mountains to the Bell River. In the 
early days when the Hudson's Bay Company had posts 
on the Bell and Porcupine Rivers, the freight to supply 
these used to come down the Mackenzie to Macpherson 
and was then carried by porters over the mountains to 
La Pierre's House. It was the feet of these porters that 
had made the trail which we were now to follow. 

Firth told me many interesting stories about the old 
portaging days. The goods of the Company used to be 
made into ninety-pound packages each of which was 
known as a "piece." They would employ no man in the 
portaging who could not make eighty miles in four days 
carrying in addition to the ninety-pound piece whatever 
he needed in the way of food and bedding. Many of 
the men could carry two pieces or 180 pounds, and Firth 
had known three or four who would carry three pieces 
each and their food for four days, a rifle, and some 
ammunition, a frying pan, teapot, and even sometimes 



OVER THE ARCTIC MOUNTAINS an 

something in addition. He told me I would have to 
manage with boys whom he could not recommend in any 
way and that they would probably fail to make the dis- 
tance in four days unless their loads were lighter than 
eighty pounds. 

The Indians eventually engaged were Joseph, who was 
over twenty years old, and William, who was about 
seventeen. William was, however, the bigger of the two. 
When it came to outfitting, it was they rather than Firth 
or I that insisted on heavy loads. They wanted to take 
along so much corned beef and so much bacon and so 
much of various other things for provisions. 

I found out from Firth that the regular wages were 
four dollars a day for the journey to the Bell, the In- 
dians receiving no pay on their way back home. Think- 
ing that I would get better service by offering a lump 
sum, I told the Indians (through Firth as interpreter) 
that instead of paying them four dollars a day, which 
would give them only twenty dollars for the trip if it 
took five days, I would pay them thirty-five dollars each, 
no matter in how few days we made it. I also offered 
a prize in case we made it in less than the regular time. 
The bargain seemed to please not only the men them- 
selves but all their relatives who had gathered to help 
in the negotiations. 

August 13 th we got away from the Fort and were 
ferried across the Peel River by a boat belonging to Mr. 
Harvey, a Free Trader who had set up at Macpherson 
a rival establishment to that of the Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany. Harvey had been no less kind to me than Firth. 
As the general arrangements for my trip were in Firth's 
hands, Harvey had made up for his lack of opportunity 
in helping with the general outfitting by insisting on 



212 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

making me several presents. He said I would be sure 
to find along the road Indians who would have to be paid 
for their services. There is a certain type of silk hand- 
kerchief which at that time passed practically for money, 
and of these Harvey gave me several. He also gave me 
certain delicacies of food. 

The police at the barracks insisted that I must not 
go unarmed, and gave me one of their service revolvers. 
I had left my rifle behind at Herschel with the idea that 
the journey would be almost entirely by boat or raft, 
first on the ocean and the Mackenzie River and later on 
the Bell River and Porcupine, and that I would not have 
time to stop along the road to hunt. I did not, there- 
fore, really want the revolver, but because I valued the 
kind intentions of the police in this matter I took it. I 
was to return the revolver to the head office of the police 
at Regina when I got out. 

Once across the river our journey with pack loads 
began. The two Indians were carrying about eighty 
pounds each and I was carrying about forty pounds. 
This division of the packs had been made to conform 
with Firth's ideas of practicability and propriety. I 
understood it was not considered good form for an 
employer to carry as much as his Indians did. 

We had no trouble following the path for about five 
miles when we came to the place where I had said 
good-bye to Elihu Stewart the year before. Stewart had 
started out from Macpherson in the evening and his 
camping five miles from the post had, accordingly, 
seemed to me logical. When my Indians now insisted 
on camping at the same place I saw no logic in it for it 
was not yet evening, but they said that all people who 
went across the mountains camped there and that, 



OVER THE ARCTIC MOUNTAINS 213 

while this counted regularly for one day so far as wages 
were concerned, it was not counted when people were 
saying they could do the eighty-mile portage in four 
days. They also explained that on the fourth of the 
counted days we would camp a few miles away from 
Bell River and make that distance the next morning 
without counting that as a day either except in the pay- 
ment of wages. There would, accordingly, be six wage 
days although we would say that the journey had been 
made in four days. All this might have been amusing 
had I been on an ordinary journey but when I was 
racing with Harrison and his bad news the idea did not 
suit so well. There was nothing to do about it, how- 
ever, for the Indians reminded me that they were still 
near home and if their ways did not suit me they could 
easily go back and I could hire some other Indians. 

I have learned it better since but I understood even 
then that there is nothing to do except to make the best 
of this sort of situation. I showed no hard feeling and 
presently we were all laughing and chatting together. It 
was then that the Indians explained that there was a 
reason for their camping here, for to-morrow we would 
find no suitable camping place until evening. They said 
that if we proceeded now we would be tired out before 
we could get to a tolerable camp site. All this I believed 
that evening and it was a good thing I did, for it made 
me sleep better. Next day I discovered there was no 
truth in it, for there were good camp sites along the road 
the whole day. Thereupon the Indians owned up that 
they had not been over this road before. They said 
they had always understood there were no good camping 
places and professed to regret having misinformed me 
the day before. 



214 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

Looking back to it, this journey is one of the most 
interesting I ever made. At the time it was one of the 
most disagreeable. I noticed the first evening that 
William did a good deal of coughing. He spoke no Eng- 
lish, but Joseph explained to me that some weeks before 
William had had a hemorrhage from the lungs and that 
people expected him to die the next year from tuber- 
culosis. I could tell that William knew what Joseph was 
explaining to me. As he seemed in no way depressed, 
I wondered whether that was a sign he did not worry 
about dying or whether it indicated that the story was 
a fabrication. But the more I saw of William the more 
I believed that he was seriously sick and that the story 
was true. 

William's illness showed itself not only in coughing 
but also in weakness and in shortness of breath. The 
next morning Joseph took twenty pounds of William's 
pack, so' that now he had a hundred and William only 
about fifty pounds. We had not been many miles on 
the road when it became evident that a hundred pounds 
was too much for Joseph to carry and I took some of it. 
We agreed that William's share of the load should be 
the heaviest food, such as the corned beef, and we ate 
four times a day hugely. This lightened his load so 
rapidly that by the third day he had scarcely anything 
in his pack although Joseph and I were still carrying 
moderate loads. 

When we left Macpherson the mosquitoes had been 
bad in the lowland but as we got higher into the moun- 
tains they ceased to bother us much. Had the journey 
been made a month earlier the reverse would have been 
true, for in no place are mosquitoes less tolerable than 
above the treeline in arctic mountains. The season had 



OVER THE ARCTIC MOUNTAINS 215 

advanced enough so that we now had severe frosts at 
night which had a quieting effect on the insect world, 
although the temperature in the daytime still rose to 
about 80 °. 

The first day and a part of the second the road led 
mainly through a spruce forest; then we began to cross 
ridges covered with grass. This was my first real ex- 
perience with the "nigger heads" that are described by 
so many travelers who have dealt with the northern part 
of the American mainland. Essentially the ground is 
covered with hummocks, varying between the size of an 
orange and that of a man's head, or sometimes larger. 
These hummocks are really shaped like mushrooms. 
There is a wobbly head to them, covered with vegeta- 
tion, and between are deep crevices. You try to step 
from the middle of one hummock to the middle of 
another and about once in three times your foot slips off 
and you go halfway to the knee in mud. I know no 
experience more heartbreaking than the struggle towards 
the evening of a long day if you are carrying sixty or 
eighty pounds. 

Were it not for my great respect for Firth's general 
veracity I should doubt whether any Indians or other 
human beings could carry loads of three hundred pounds 
across such country at the rate of twenty miles a day. 
It was all I could do to carry eighty pounds twenty 
miles. I judge from my later experience, however, that 
part of my trouble was due to inexperience in handling 
a back load. 

The third day from Macpherson we crossed the ridge 
of the mountains. I do not know how high above sea 
level this took us — probably not over two or three thou- 
sand feet. Still, we were above the treeline. There was 



216 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

even some snow from last year in small banks in the lee 
of steep cliffs. The Indians said, however, that this 
snow would all be gone in two or three weeks and that 
there would be a month or so between its disappearance 
and the coming of the next winter. I judge that a moun- 
tain in this vicinity would have to be six or seven thou- 
sand feet high to be cold enough for any snow to remain 
permanently. 

The evening after crossing the divide we had a de- 
lightful camp site in a grove of tall spruces by a small 
river that flowed west towards the Bell. We were high 
enough up so that it was cold towards morning and when 
we awoke there was hoar frost on the grass. Before 
leaving our camp we had a discussion as to where we 
should strike for the Bell. The Indians said the nearest 
way would be to go directly towards the site of La 
Pierre's House but that the trees in that locality would 
be too small for building the raft on which I wanted to 
travel down the river. I should have liked to see the 
ruins of this -mountain outpost of the Hudson's Bay 
Company, but the main consideration was to try to reach 
a telegraph station ahead of Harrison's bad news and I 
could not afford time for sightseeing. I told the Indians, 
therefore, to head as nearly as they could for the nearest 
point on the Bell where there were trees large enough 
for a raft. I think that had we gone to La Pierre's House 
we might have followed the little branch river at which 
we had been camped, but now we had to climb out of its 
valley and march all day at an angle to the streams, so 
that we had to cross several small rivers and climb a 
good many hills. We did not quite make the Bell that 
day, but the Indians said it was not far. 

The next morning we got to the Bell after a march of 



OVER THE ARCTIC MOUNTAINS SJ17 

two or three hours. I was eager to start at once building 
a raft but the Indians were slow about it. I had noticed 
the previous evening that they had been less cheerful 
than usual and this morning they had been sulky. On 
arrival at the Bell River they sat down and acted as if 
they did not know if they would ever stand up again. 
When I asked them what the trouble was they said they 
were feeling injured about not getting the same wages 
as all other packers. Ever since the gold rush (1897-99) 
there had been a standard wage for this sort of work. 
Their fathers and uncles and all their friends always 
used to get four dollars a day, and why could they not 
get four dollars a day? I reminded them that the wages 
I offered them had been satisfactory when we talked it 
over with Firth and pointed out in addition that they 
were getting thirty-five dollars for the trip which would 
be more than four dollars a day. They expressed them- 
selves as very doubtful as to whether thirty-five dollars 
was more than four dollars a day and said that, as they 
had worked hard for me and faithfully, they did not see 
why they should not get the same wages as everybody 
else. 

We haggled about this for an hour but I was unable 
to make it clear to them that thirty-five dollars is more 
than four dollars a day for six days. Accordingly, I 
agreed that I would pay them four dollars a day. The 
arrangement had been that I would give the Indians a 
letter to take back to Firth, certifying that they had 
performed their task properly, whereupon he was to give 
each of them thirty-five dollars. I now wrote Firth, 
explaining that they were dissatisfied with thirty-five 
dollars and wanted instead four dollars a day. I said 



218 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

he was to use his judgment whether to take them at their 
word or whether to give them the larger amount. 

As soon as I had written this letter and translated it 
to Joseph, both Indians became cheerful and commenced 
at once chopping down trees to make the raft. 

[When I was on my way north on my second expedi- 
tion (1908) I saw Firth again and asked him what had 
happened to the wages of the Indians. He said that 
when they had come back he had received news of it 
right away and had expected them to come that same 
day to get their wages. They did not come, however, 
until the next day and were then accompanied by a large 
number of their relatives and friends. When they 
handed him my letter and he read it over, he asked 
whether it was correct that they preferred four dollars 
a day, whereupon not only they but also their relatives 
spoke up and said that it was only fair. Everybody else 
had been getting four dollars a day for years and they 
did not see why these young men should not get the 
same wage. Thereupon Firth paid each of them twenty- 
four dollars and they went home well satisfied. This 
left him twenty-two dollars to refund to me.] 

Although the Indians and I worked hard at the mak- 
ing of the raft, it took all the rest of the day. For 
making the raft we had brought along a sharp new ax 
and several hundred feet of strong but slender rope. 
The logs we used were about twenty feet long, about a 
foot in diameter at the big end and four inches at the 
small end. To make a good buoyant raft we should have 
had dry logs, but others had built their rafts in this 
locality ahead of us and, although we went as much as 
half a mile afield, we got only enough dry wood to make 
half of the raft. The rest, then, had to be green. 



OVER THE ARCTIC MOUNTAINS 219 

When all was done I had a raft twenty feet long, about 
ten feet wide at the big end and six feet wide at the 
small end. On the middle of this raft we made a fire- 
place of stones so that I could cook meals without losing 
any time in landing. Firth had told me that there were 
few rapids in the river and none dangerous. It was my 
intention, accordingly, to sleep on the raft and travel 
both day and night. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

ON A RAFT DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 

The morning of August 19th my Indians turned towards 
Macpherson and I began my long drift alone down the 
Bell and Porcupine Rivers. I did not then realize how 
long it was to be, for this was my first journey at the 
mercy of a river current. By the map and as the crow 
flies the distance did not seem so formidable. But the 
Bell is one of the slowest of rivers, flowing through the 
most crooked of valleys, so that my estimate of the dis- 
tance was multiplied by two and my hope of speed cut 
down by at least half. Under ordinary circumstances 
I think I might have enjoyed the lackadaisical Bell but 
now I was in a race. I estimated that by this time the 
bad news would be somewhere on the Slave River be- 
tween Great Slave Lake and Athabasca Lake. To be 
sure of winning I had to get to a telegraph office by the 
first of September. If I were much later than that, 
nothing but some bad luck to Harrison could give me 
the good luck of winning. 

The current varied a great deal. Once or twice a day 
it cheered me up for a while by speeding along at three 
miles an hour. But much of the time it was only half 
a mile an hour and I think the average was somewhere 
between a mile and a mile and a half. Traveling 
twenty-four hours a day I would be making at the most 
thirty-six miles, and thirty-six miles by the river would 
be no more than twenty miles in a straight line. By 

220 



DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 221 

what Firth had told me it was less than three hundred 
miles to Rampart House, but he was referring to the 
sledge trails which do not follow the river and are much 
shorter. I had been told that at Rampart House I would 
be sure to find Indians whom I could hire with their 
canoes to paddle me rapidly the remaining two hundred 
miles to the Yukon. 

My Indians had said there was a possibility that I 
might fall in with some fishing Indians or some moose 
hunters almost any time. If fishing, they would be 
camping beside the river, but if hunting moose they 
might be some distance back. They told me to watch 
carefully for smoke inland, for if Indians have the luck 
to kill a big moose, and more especially if they kill two 
or three, they will camp by the kill to smoke-dry the 
meat. They had also told me that at this season of 
year I might find some bad rapids in the river and had 
warned me to be careful. 

With these two ideas of moose-hunting Indians and 
possible rapids in my head I found excitement in round- 
ing each curve in the river, for the next stretch held the 
promise of an Indian smoke and the threat of a rapid. 
These uncertainties helped wonderfully to pass the time, 
but occasionally I would get into a placid stretch where 
I could see the river below me for a mile or two ahead 
and where the current was only half a mile an hour. 
These were undeniably tedious spells, even if they gave 
me the best possible chance to study the scenery. 

Although I was still a hundred miles north of the arctic 
circle, I found the scenery here not very different from 
that of the Athabasca River, a thousand miles farther 
south. I suppose the trees along the Athabasca must be 
stouter and taller but as you travel along the river you 



222 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

do not notice that, and here as there are the forest-clad 
hills rolling away into the distance. On the Athabasca 
there are no mountains in sight and on the Bell when 
I looked at right angles to the river's course I saw no 
mountains, but whenever a long vista opened either ahead 
or behind I was likely to see mountains in the distance. 
None of them was snow-covered but their tops were 
bare of trees, for the forest went only a third of the way 
or half the way up their slopes. The highest of the 
peaks would be under ten thousand feet. 

The down-river journey was monotonous but every 
day something happened to vary the monotony a little. 
One day a moose was standing on the river bank as I 
drifted around a bend. I sat motionless on my raft 
wondering how near I would pass, for the raft was at 
the mercy of the current and was carried sometimes 
along one bank and sometimes along the other. The 
river here was about two or three hundred yards wide. 
When I was still several hundred yards above the moose 
he noticed my raft and began to watch it carefully. It 
is the nature of animals that they do not recognize a 
man as long as he makes no movement, and apparently 
the moose took my craft and me for half a dozen tangled 
spruce trees drifting together. Still, it must have seemed 
to him that there was something peculiar, for when we 
got abreast he suddenly plunged into the river and came 
swimming towards me. He came within eight or ten feet 
and then started to swim around me on the downstream 
side. There was no noticeable wind but I suppose the 
air must have been moving downstream, for when he 
got in front of the raft he was scared by something, 
turned around suddenly and swam back to shore. He 
was not badly frightened for he stopped on landing to 



DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 223 

look back. Then he walked into the forest and disap- 
peared. 

But for this meeting with the moose I should have had 
no chance to kill game with my revolver so long as I 
was on the river. This chance I did not take for I 
considered I had enough bacon and groceries to take me 
all the way. But I suppose I could have killed some 
fish for they were jumping out of the water all around 
me nearly all the time. I have at other times shot fish 
both with rifles and shotguns and had no doubt of my 
ability to get some with the revolver. If you are in 
a position to seize a fish you do not actually have to hit 
him, for the impact of the bullet on the water right near 
him will stun him temporarily. 

When the mind is strongly preoccupied with any idea 
your eyes will play curious tricks on you. There was 
scarcely a long stretch of the river when I did not dis- 
cover in the blue distance an Indian smoke curling up. 
But as I drifted nearer and nearer the smoke became less 
and less certain until it generally disappeared. Some 
persisted, however, until I came abreast of them, where- 
upon I used to land and walk half a mile or so inland 
to the top of a hill. As these hilltops were frequently 
covered with trees I used to have to climb a tree to get 
a view, whereupon I failed to see smoke and returned 
to the river. 

But in one case the smoke was indubitable. I saw 
three or four wisps of it curling up among the trees 
about half a mile inland. I think this was on the third 
or fourth day. Sure now of having found people, I fired 
three shots from my revolver to attract their attention, 
but got no reply. This was strange, for a number of 
shots in rapid succession are recognized by the northern 



324 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

Indians everywhere as a signal and are always replied 
to. There was no doubt about the smoke, however, so 
I went inland and found its origin in some burning peat. 
There had been an Indian campfire there a month or two 
before and since then the fire had spread to cover several 
acres of ground. It had not blazed up but was smolder- 
ing its way through the peat. 

The reason why the peat fire had not developed into 
a real forest fire was undoubtedly in the frequent rains. 
I have never seen such regularity of weather. There 
used to be clear skies until somewhere between eleven 
and one o'clock, whereupon clouds gathered and by three 
there would be at least one light shower followed some- 
times by several others. By six or seven o'clock the 
skies were clear again and remained so during the night. 
This rain had soaked me every day not at all to my 
advantage but had been a blessing thus far in saving 
the forest. There was a much heavier rain three or four 
days after this which probably killed the peat fire. 
Had there been a dry spell instead, and especially dry 
weather accompanied by a high wind, there would have 
developed one of the fires which so frequently destroy 
hundreds and even thousands of square miles of the vast 
forests of the North. 

It was a curious chance which guided me inland at 
this particular place, for on my way back I discovered 
evidence of what was probably one of the many untold 
tragedies of the North. The story, as I have deduced 
it from the evidence, needs the historical background of 
the gold rush. 

In the history of the northern gold fields the year 1898 
takes the place of 1849 m the gold days of California. 
In 1897 stories had come to the world of newspapers, 



DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 225 

telling of fabulous riches in the Klondike section of the 
Canadian part of the Yukon valley. The idea presently 
crystallized that there were four routes by which this 
El Dorado could be reached. One lay by Seattle and 
Skagway and the mountain passes that lead to the upper 
Yukon near White Horse and then down the Yukon to 
the gold country. Another trail was from Edmonton 
through the Peace River Valley. A third went from 
Edmonton down the Athabasca and Slave Rivers and 
through Great Slave Lake to the mouth of the Liard and 
then up the Liard and thus across the mountains. With 
none of these are we concerned here but only with the 
fourth route which came on down the Mackenzie past 
the Liard to Macpherson and then over the mountains 
either by the route I had just traversed or else by the 
Rat River portage which we had considered taking. I 
had not taken the Rat River route because I had not 
had a boat, and exactly so had it been with the miners 
in 1898. Those who had boats went up the Rat and 
then down the Bell. Those who had no boats carried 
pack loads over the mountains as I had done, and then 
built rafts or boats on the Bell to continue the journey. 
Some took a third way, going up the Peel River and then 
crossing from the upper Peel to the Klondike. 

The men who came down the Mackenzie in hundreds 
were of all sorts. Only a few were fitted for their ad- 
venture through previous experience such as might be 
gained in the winter woods of Michigan or Ontario. 
Others, although miners of long experience, came from 
Australia or South Africa and were as little trained for 
the northern journey as if they had come from farms 
in Illinois. Some did come from farms in Illinois or 
from shops in England or New England. A few of these 



226 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

had such natural gifts that they adapted themselves to 
northern conditions, but in the main the Klondikers were 
hopeless incompetents. It seems difficult now to believe 
how many of them found a way of dying by drowning 
or some other accident or by starving or committing 
suicide. Many died of scurvy. 

For the scurvy they were not individually to blame, 
for their ignorance of how easily it can be prevented 
was merely the ignorance of the medical profession oi 
that day who supposed that scurvy could be prevented 
only by the drinking of lime juice or the eating of vege- 
tables and fruits. We know now that scurvy can be 
cured by an underdone steak no less than by a raw potato 
or an orange. We know also that while uncooked foods, 
whether fruits, vegetables or meat, are good antidotes 
for scurvy, they lose their power on being cooked. But 
in their ignorance the prospectors used to eat mainly 
the beans and bacon and other things they had brought 
with them. A few of them only had the luck or skill 
to kill game, in which case they ordinarily overcooked 
the meat until it no longer had any value as a preven- 
tive or cure for scurvy. When they actually became ill 
with the disease some of them took the boughs of the 
spruce trees, considering them a vegetable and a possible 
cure for scurvy. They probably would have been a cure 
had they been eaten raw in the manner of a salad, but 
the miners ordinarily put them in pots and boiled them 
for hours, making a decoction which they called spruce 
tea. This was drunk without any beneficial effect so far 
as the scurvy was concerned, and many who had escaped 
drowning in the rivers or hunger on the portages died of 
this loathsome disease. 

On my way back from the fire that had led me half 



DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 227 

a mile into the woods I came upon what I supposed to 
be the evidence of one of these tragedies. It was a 
partly-built log cabin, but beautifully built so far as it 
went. The logs were of uniform size, hewn smooth and 
well fitted together. The walls were of the ordinary full 
height for a log cabin but there the building had stopped. 
No openings had been cut in the walls for windows or 
for a door, and there was only a partial roof composed 
of poles with some brush on top. I climbed up on the 
wall and dropped inside. Here I found a Bible decayed 
to pieces, a rusted teapot, a heavily silver-plated Win- 
chester rifle, a fur robe so decayed that it resembled wet 
brown paper, a china saucer that had been used for a 
grease lamp, and some other odds and ends. 

It seemed to me that these were articles which under 
ordinary circumstances would not have been left behind. 
And had they been left, they would have been piled up 
in a corner or arranged in some orderly way. I imagine 
at the time the tragedy occurred the men who were 
building the house were still living in a tent camp down 
by the river where they had most of their belongings. 
After some misfortune had happened to them, some In- 
dians or other miners had probably found the tent camp 
and taken it away but the house had escaped notice, 
for it was so hidden by trees that there was no sign of 
it from the river. The logs out of which the house had 
been built had all been chopped nearby and the trees 
close to the river left intact. 

I should probably have taken with me at least the 
silver-plated rifle but for the plan which I had already 
formed of some day soon leaving my raft behind and 
walking along the river till I found Indians. I 
was beginning to lose patience with the raft; and if I 



228 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

undertook to walk the added weight of the rifle would be 
a burden. 

The night after my discovery of this deserted cabin 
I was as usual sleeping on my raft as it drifted. 
Midsummer was now long past; furthermore, I was 
traveling south so that it was dark for two or three hours 
around midnight. Because of the uncertainty of every- 
thing I never slept soundly. Now I was awakened by 
what I took at first for the rustle of leaves. I was lying 
quietly looking up at the stars and listening to what 
sounded like wind among trees, when it suddenly oc- 
curred to me that this could not be the sound of any 
wind for there were no leaves to rustle — an evergreen 
forest makes no such sound as that made by aspen leaves 
or those of other deciduous trees. 

If it was not the noise of leaves it must be the only 
logical noise of the same sort that one may hear in this 
locality — the murmur of a rapid or a waterfall. It was 
so dark that I could not see the land clearly on either 
bank of the river and apparently the stream at this par- 
ticular point was especially wide. I had no idea on 
which side the rapids would be worse, but knew that the 
most favorable place to run them would be where the 
current was strongest. The chances were that my raft 
would keep to the strongest current and would find a 
safe place (if there was one) if I left it to its own 
course. 

It was a tense half hour as I sat motionless in the 
middle of my raft with the noise of the rapids gradually 
increasing. I don't think it ever became loud enough 
to deserve the name of a roar but it sounded quite loud 
enough to make me feel uncomfortable. 

When I got almost to the rapids the current had taken 



DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 229 

the raft near enough to one river bank so that I could 
see the trees plainly. They were flitting by rapidly 
which showed my speed was increasing. Then the raft 
began to bump on an occasional boulder. The bumps 
became more and more frequent and I was wondering 
whether the rope would hold by which the logs were tied 
together, when all of a sudden the downstream end of 
the raft stuck fast. Then the raft swung broadside to 
the current and bumped along over two or three more 
boulders, stopped, and the upstream edge began to rise 
as if the raft were about to flop over. I grabbed all my 
belongings, including the stones which made the fire- 
place, and shifted them and myself to the rising edge. 
This was enough to bring it down and lift the down- 
stream edge so that the raft commenced moving again. 
There were half a dozen more serious bumps and then 
we drifted into quiet water below. 

It was not particularly likely that there would be a 
second rapid just below this one. But drifting through 
an unknown rapid in the dark is no fun, and it had 
taken so much of my nerve that after a little debate with 
myself I started poling ashore. I landed about half a 
mile below the rapids, and decided to sleep there and 
wait for daylight. After this I traveled each day only 
while there was light enough to see some distance ahead, 
which was about eighteen hours of the twenty-four. 

The next day I wrote in my diary: "Home has never 
seemed as far away as it does moping down this infernal 
river on a headstrong and lazy raft." The feeling of 
impatience indicated by this entry kept growing. The 
next day I came to the end of my patience, poled the 
raft ashore, packed on my back the twenty or thirty 
pounds of food and other things I had with me (little 



230 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

beyond my diary and some mail I was carrying out for 
the police), and started to walk along the river. 

But if rafting had its disadvantages, walking had them 
no less. To begin with, the river bank was made up of 
angular blocks of rock which began to hurt my feet right 
away and promised to hurt them more as I walked fur- 
ther. Then my clothing and especially my footgear was 
not in the best of condition. On the rest of my body 
I was wearing woolen clothes but on my feet I had 
Eskimo style water boots. The uppers of these are made 
of seal skin as thin and soft as a kid glove but perfectly 
waterproof. The soles are of the thick leather of the 
bearded seal. This is almost perfect footgear for the 
summer if it is kept in condition. But that can be ac- 
complished only with extreme care. You must never 
wear the same pair of boots more than at the most two 
days in succession, when you take them off and dry them 
thoroughly. Well taken care of, two pairs of boots regu- 
larly alternated may last four or five months, but if you 
wear one pair continuously it will rot to pieces in a few 
days. On the march over the mountains from Mac- 
pherson I had taken the boots off in the evening and 
managed to dry them fairly well every night so that, 
although I did not have another pair to change into, I 
still kept them in fair condition. But it was chilly sleep- 
ing on the raft and I had kept my boots on. Similarly 
when I went ashore I had kept all my clothes on, for 
I had no bedding and shivered as it was, especially as 
I got soaking wet every day in the afternoon showers. 

After I had been walking a few hundred yards along 
the river bank I stopped to adjust the laces that are 
bound around the ankle of the water boot. When I 
pulled on these one of them came off. A little later 



DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 231 

when I was fixing the other boot and gave a pull on the 
upper I tore a great opening in it along the edge of the 
sole. I now realized that my boots were rotten and that 
I should not be able to walk in them many days. 

I might have turned back in an hour or so because 
of the boots but what actually turned me back was that 
I came to a tributary river so deep that it could not be 
waded and so turbulent that trying to swim it would 
have been dangerous. I was carrying the same ax and 
could perhaps have gone half a mile upstream and found 
a place where I could make a raft for crossing out of 
two or three trees, but rather than do this I went back 
for my old raft. 

The walk from the place where I had left the raft 
behind to the uncrossable stream and back was only four 
or five miles but my feet were so badly bruised by the 
rocks in that short distance that I was thoroughly recon- 
ciled to the raft. Although at the time I regarded this 
as a useless delay, I think now it was really worth while 
through the peace of mind it gave me. Before that I 
had been thinking and planning continually and worry- 
ing about whether I should not leave the raft behind. 
Now I had no doubts about the advisability of sticking 
to it to the end. 

The interest of the down river journey was heightened 
by my absolute ignorance of the country. The decision 
to start south had been made so hurriedly at Herschel 
Island that we had not thought of asking the whalers 
for a possible map. At Macpherson none was obtain- 
able. Firth had told me a good deal about the river but 
much of what he told me I had forgotten. I knew so 
little that when a river the same size as the Bell joined 
it on my left-hand side, I was surprised, for I thought 



232 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

the Porcupine ought to come in on the right-hand bank. 
Indubitably this was the Porcupine, however, for I knew 
it to be a stream somewhat larger in reality than the 
Bell and that these two are the only rivers of comparable 
size. I remembered Firth had told me that although the 
Old Crow was large, it was a good deal smaller than 
the Bell. 

Not far from the Porcupine mouth I saw the second 
moose. It was walking along the river bank, headed 
downstream, and a quarter of a mile away from the raft. 
Just to see what it would do, I fired my revolver into the 
hillside above it. Either the actual noise of the bullet 
striking the hillside or the echo of the shot deceived the 
animal into thinking the danger was up the hill, for after 
trotting along the bank a few steps it plunged into the 
river to swim across. When it got abreast of my raft 
and about a hundred yards downstream from it, it sud- 
denly turned and swam back again. I think this was 
because I was trying to row (for the river just here was 
too deep for poling) and it probably heard the splashing. 

Rafts are ordinarily handled with poles and I had one 
about fourteen feet long. I seldom used it except for 
sounding purposes. I found by that means that the 
water is more than fourteen feet deep in a good many 
places. Apart from the rapid through which I went in 
the night, I think the river could have been navigated 
at that season by a boat drawing three or four feet of 
water. But this seemed to be about the season of high 
water. Now that I was sleeping ashore nights, I used 
to put a mark in the water's edge in the evening and 
take it up the next morning. I would find by this means 
that the river had risen some nights as much as an inch 
per hour. By the water marks along the beach I could 



DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 233 

tell that the water seldom got higher than it now was 
except in spring freshets. 

At various points I had seen signs of old Indian camp- 
ings. In some places there were merely the sites of 
camp fires and the pegs driven in the mud to which the 
Indians had fastened their nets when they were fishing. 
In other places were the conical teepee frames over 
which they had spread their tents. Occasionally there 
was a platform cache. 

Shortly after passing the juncture of the Bell and 
Porcupine I came to a village site which in addition to 
the teepee frames had a platform cache with something 
on it. I went ashore to investigate and found some 
bundles of Indian property and a good deal of dried 
moose meat covered up by a large piece of moose skin. 
My provisions were beginning to run low and I am fond 
of dried moose meat, so I took several pounds of it and 
left in payment a silk handkerchief. Had I had nothing 
to pay with I should have been entitled by the custom 
of the country to take what food I thought I needed to 
carry me to the next settlement. But I had been provided 
by Harvey with silk handkerchiefs for just such pay- 
ments. 

Day by day my raft was getting lower in the water. 
Some of the logs had been partly decayed and were 
rapidly getting watersoaked. I had to throw awaj^ my 
stone fireplace to lighten the raft. A day later the water 
was washing over whenever I came into a slight ripple, so 
I went ashore and got an armful of dry willows out of 
which I made a kind of nest on the middle of the raft 
and sat or slept on that. The day after I built this the 
water-logging process had gone so much farther that there 
did not show above the water anything but my nest and 



234 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

some humps of two or three crooked logs in the raft. 

After throwing away my fireplace I had to do whatever 
cooking there was on shore. The first morning of this 
cooking I left beside the fireplace on shore my package 
of tea. This was two or three pounds and far more than 
I could possibly have needed. I had been carrying it for 
trade with any Indians I might happen to meet. 

The evening of August 26th I came to a deserted vil- 
lage just as it was getting dark. The houses appeared as 
if they might have been inhabited the previous winter 
and as if the people intended returning to them. Still, 
the half-dozen cabins were empty of furniture and the 
doors of some of them open. It had been raining par- 
ticularly heavily that day and I was soaking wet, so I was 
glad of the shelter of a roof. The reason I knew the 
houses were entirely empty was that I went into every 
one of them in search of a possible blanket or robe that 
an Indian might have left for me to sleep under. Al- 
though it was dark, my exploration of each cabin was 
thorough, but I found no beds or bedding. 

I have said that after my midnight adventure with the 
rapids I was in the habit of sleeping ashore six hours. 
Sleeping is merely a courtesy description, for when the 
wetness due to the afternoon showers was combined with 
the chill of the night, it kept me from any real sleep. 
I did get good naps on my craft, however, in the fore- 
noons while the sun was shining. 

After my night in the deserted village I was up at 
dawn and made a huge bonfire. It is much easier cook- 
ing over a small fire but this one was primarily for 
warmth. As I was finishing breakfast I was startled to 
hear a voice behind me. On looking around I saw an 
Indian a few yards away coming up from the river where 



DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 235 

he had beached his canoe. I should have been glad to 
see anybody, but I was particularly glad to recognize this 
old fellow for I had met him at Macpherson the year 
before. He had been there in his capacity of deacon of 
the Church of England to confer with the missionary and 
had later been the man who- undertook to help Stewart 
across the mountains. The Deacon spoke passable 
English and I soon knew how everything stood. 

The house I had slept in was the Deacon's. He and 
his family would occupy it after the freeze-up some two 
months from now. They and the other Indians that 
belonged in this village were now camped about half a 
mile away beyond the next bend, and if I had not gone 
ashore just here because of seeing the houses I should 
a few minutes later have drifted into sight of their camp- 
fires and should have had a far more pleasant night. We 
proceeded to their camp now. The Deacon's canoe was 
so small that two of us could not ride in it and I had 
to pole my way to the village with my raft. Once there 
my regrets for an uncomfortable night were soon forgot- 
ten in the warm welcome of the Indians. 

At the village there were small canoes, all made of 
birch bark. It is one of the signs of intimate connection 
between these Indians and the Eskimos to the north that 
their canoes are much the shape and size of the Eskimo 
kayaks, although differing, of course, in not being covered 
over. They are one-man boats. One of them was almost 
big enough for two men, however, and I asked the Deacon 
whether he would not undertake to carry me in that down 
to Rampart House. At first he said it could not be done. 
We considered the possibility of my paddling my own 
canoe, but this type of craft is so exceedingly cranky and 
there would be some rapids to run, so the Indians were 



236 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

all against my trying it. At first they thought of build- 
ing a large raft for me, for- they said my small and water- 
logged one would never do for running the rapids. Later, 
however, we made an actual trial of the biggest canoe 
and it turned out that we had about two inches of free- 
board with the two of us in it. We decided that this 
would be all right in quiet water. The Deacon knew 
where all the rapids were and said he would land me 
above each series of rapids and run them alone, picking 
me up again below the dangerous water. 

Up to now I had thought it probable that the Indians 
would know about the cabin I had found and about which 
I had woven the story of a gold seeker tragedy. Careful 
inquiry showed that they had no knowledge of the place, 
although they had been up and down that river every 
summer by canoe and every winter by dog team their 
whole lives long. I tried my best to describe the location, 
and they said they would look for it whenever they 
went up that way. I have never heard if they found it. 

But a story that interested them more than the deserted 
cabin was my account of how I had cooked breakfast 
ashore and had forgotten several pounds of tea tied up 
in a silk handkerchief. I had not been at the village 
an hour when one of the men got into his canoe and 
started upstream in search of the tea and handkerchief. 
I estimate he had forty miles to go. However, he said 
that he might get a moose on the journey, thus killing 
two birds with one stone. 

Compared to my sluggish drift, the canoe journey from 
the mouth of thesOld Crow seemed like flying. Between 
paddle and current we made from six to eight miles an 
hour. There were no rapids that could not be easily run 
in a good canoe or even in one of these bark canoes with 



DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 237 

a reasonable load, but overloaded as we were I had to go 
ashore a few times to walk around a rapid. Occasionally 
we took a chance and ran through a ripple, but it never 
really paid, for the canoe always sprung a leak and each 
time we only barely got ashore before sinking. Then it 
took two or three hours to make a fire, melt some spruce 
gum and patch up the cracks in the bark. 

It took two days from Old Crow River to Rampart 
House. A few miles above that trading post we came to 
an encampment of a white man, Archie Linklater, who 
was living there with his Indian wife and family. We 
had a pleasant visit with them, after which Linklater took 
me on his raft to Rampart House, for the river between 
was swift and would not have been safe to run in a bark 
canoe carrying two men. 

At Rampart House I had the warmest sort of welcome 
from Daniel Cadzow, the local trader and only resident 
white man (there were several other white men who made 
up a sort of floating population). It would have been 
pleasant to linger there as he urged me to do but it was 
now the 30th of August and in two or three days Mr. 
Harrison might reach Athabasca Landing and send out 
over the world the report that I had told at Herschel 
Island of the death of Leffingwell, Mikkelson and Stork- 
erson. As soon as Mr. Cadzow understood how pressing 
the case was he ceased his urging that I should stay and 
devoted himself instead to helping with preparations for 
my continuing the journey. I had thought of hiring 
Indians, but Cadzow said that Linklater would take me 
to Fort Yukon much more rapidly than any Indian. 
Linklater undertook the job, and in a few hours he and 
his family were on their way with me in a flat-bottomed 
rowboat. 



238 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

I have never seen a man who could work as Linklater 
did. He was over six feet in height, powerfully built 
and used to the roughest kind of work. For years he had 
been a member of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police 
at Dawson, at which time he had gained a reputation as 
a traveler. He had never been a sailor, but he must have 
done a good deal of rowing in his time, for he kept stead- 
ily at the oars something like sixteen hours a day. The 
current was sluggish and we had little help from it, so 
that with all our hard work we did not get to Fort Yukon 
until the evening of September 3rd. It turned out, how- 
ever, that somewhat greater speed would not have helped 
particularly, for there was only one logical way of pro- 
ceeding upstream from Fort Yukon to the telegraph sta- 
tion at Eagle and that was by the river streamer Hanna, 
which was due about noon of the 4th. She came some 
ten hours earlier than that and I was awakened from a 
sound sleep to scramble aboard in the early morning. 
Then everything went well for a while. 

The Hanna was carrying a huge cargo, a part of which 
consisted of several hundred tons of oats in bags. She 
was loaded deeper than usual and the river had been 
dropping rapidly, so that I found soon after getting 
aboard that there was great concern as to whether we 
should be able to get through the Yukon flats. This is a 
long stretch where the river, normally about a mile or 
two in width, spreads out to six or eight miles and winds 
its way through a maze of low islands. We soon began 
to have trouble with shoal water and eventually came to 
a channel not deep enough for passage. There was noth- 
ing to do but pull up to the bank and unload some of our 
freight so as to lighten the draught of the steamer. 

There were on board the boat about a hundred laborers 



DOWN THE PORCUPINE RIVER 239 

who were returning to Seattle after a season in the Alaska 
gold mines. The captain offered these men a dollar an 
hour if they would turn to and help the crew unload 
the bags of oats, but it appeared that the miners had had 
their fare paid by their employers all the way out to 
Seattle and that this fare included board. They said, 
accordingly, that they did not care how long they were 
stuck; in fact, the longer we were stuck the better it 
suited them, for they would get that much more free 
board. Furthermore, they said they were through work- 
ing for the season, and that they were miners anyhow and 
not stevedores. 

There happened to be on the ship a number of pas- 
sengers who were eager to get to Dawson and Seattle. 
I was in no particular hurry to reach Seattle but I was 
in a hurry to get to Eagle. Accordingly, I was one of the 
passengers who volunteered and six or eight of us worked 
hard with the crew for about twelve hours carrying ashore 
bags of oats. I think we unloaded six hundred tons 
before the Hanna was light enough to pass the shallows 
above. 

We kept running aground again and again in spite of 
our unloading, and all together we lost about fifty hours' 
time. We should have reached Eagle September 5th but 
actually got there September 7th. When I sent my 
despatch out it got to the newspapers thirty-six hours too 
late. In a sense I had won the race, for my reaching the 
Yukon would have been in time if the steamer had only 
kept to its schedule. As it was, my news did not prevent 
the shock caused all over the world by the announcement 
of one more polar tragedy, nor did it prevent the writing 
of many editorials, some praising the heroism of the dead 
and others declaiming against the futility of such hare- 



240 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

brained adventures. A few of the relatives of the sup- 
posedly dead had had the good sense not to believe the 
announcement but were, nevertheless, in suspense, and 
the rest who had believed were in grief. But whether 
suspense or grief, it was better for all concerned that it 
lasted only thirty-six hours. Had I not made the journey 
over the mountains the good news would not have reached 
the telegraphs until about two months later when the 
whaling ships carrying the other members of our expedi- 
tion got to Nome or Unalaska. 



To a person who comes to the Yukon from the South it 
has many thrills. Some call it the frontier and some call 
it the wilderness, and to most such travelers the story 
of a journey along the Yukon River and across the 
Alaska mountains would seem worth writing. But I 
came from the North and to me this was "civilization." 
I ceased to make entries in my diary after boarding the 
river steamer, and began instead to plan my next arctic 
expedition. 

Those plans were soon carried out. With the fever of 
the North in my veins I remained in New York only 
seven months and then started on my second expedition, 
to spend in the Arctic the years 1908-12. 



SHORT STORIES OF ADVENTURE 



CHAPTER I 

HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT CARIBOU 

From childhood I have been a hunter of animals from 
rabbits to wolves and antelope, from partridges to swans 
and cranes. When I went to the Arctic I had a good 
opinion of myself as a hunter, but most of that was soon 
talked out of me. The theory was in the air everywhere 
that a white man could not be a good hunter. On my 
trip down the Mackenzie River, two or three of the Hud- 
son's Bay traders had told me that the best white hunters 
were better than the best Indian hunters, but the great 
majority of the traders were of the opinion that ability 
to hunt was an inborn gift with Indians and Eskimos and 
that no white man could be really good at it. When I 
came to the arctic coast I found this opinion universal. 
The whalers had much to tell of the uncanny prowess of 
the Eskimos and of the misadventures of such white men 
as had thought they were able to hunt and had tried it. 
According to the stories, the white men not only failed to 
kill game, but they used to get bewildered whenever they 
got beyond sight of ships and habitations. Sometimes 
they wandered back to their own camp or hit upon some 
other camp by accident; sometimes they had to be rescued 
by Eskimos who went out in search of them; in many 
cases they starved or froze to death. 

This was the view of white men as hunters which I got 
almost unanimously from the whalers. There were only 
two or three who disagreed. But what impressed me 

243 



244 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

even more than this nearly unanimous opinion of the 
whites was the entirely unanimous opinion of the Eskimos. 
According to their account, the white men who had gone 
hunting with them were uniformly incompetent. Most 
of them could not hit anything they tried to shoot. A few 
white men were wonderful marksmen when they were 
shooting at a still target, but were so badly afflicted with 
"buck fever" that they could not hit caribou or other 
big game. No white man was supposed to be able to 
find his way about. According to the Eskimo view, a 
white man was an amiable, overgrown baby and had to 
be watched and protected and helped in every way. At 
first these opinions did not impress me very strongly, but 
I heard them from all sides and gradually they began to 
soak in. 

I spent my first arctic winter and summer with Eskimos 
who lived mainly by fishing. If I applied myself, I 
found I could fish as well as they, nor did that surprise 
them for they were all of the opinion that white men are 
good at catching any kind of water game with hook or 
net. To see a white man do well at any such work, from 
herring fishing to whaling, did not surprise them. They 
knew also that white men can catch seals in nets. But 
white men were unable to get seals that had crawled out 
on top of the ice, for then the tactics of getting them had 
to be those of the hunter and not the fisherman. 

During my first summer I found I could kill ducks 
and geese as well as the Eskimos. This did not surprise 
them either, for it was in accordance with their general 
view. White men were good with fowling pieces and 
could even kill rabbits. 

By the fall of 1908 (my second year in the Arctic) I 
had, in spite of myself, become obsessed with the idea that 




o 



Z z 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT CARIBOU 245 

a white man cannot be a good hunter, and that it is not 
safe for him to be out alone away from the wise Eskimos. 
Had any one put it to me in just those words I might have 
argued against it, for my reason was unconvinced. But 
subconsciously I had absorbed a profound mistrust of my 
own ability to take care of myself. 

Later in September, 1908, a party of us were on our 
way by sledge east along the north coast of Alaska. I 
had one white companion, Storker Storkerson, with whom 
I was destined to be continuously associated through most 
of the following nine years of polar work. He was a 
sailor and full of confidence in himself in every way, 
except that like me he had been talked into the belief that 
he would not be able to make a living hunting and that 
he was in danger of losing his way if he got separated 
from his Eskimo guides. 

The Eskimos of my party were a middle-aged man, by 
name Kunaluak, and my old friend, Ilavinirk, with his 
wife Mamayauk and their young daughter. Ilavinirk 
differed from the general run in several ways. For one 
thing, he had a greater admiration for white men than was 
common among his countrymen at that time. The gen- 
eral Eskimo view was that the white men are rich and 
fortunate, but unskilled and incompetent in the things 
that ready matter. They felt about the whaling captains 
and about travelers like me somewhat as farmers or sailors 
might feel about grand opera singers or men who have 
inherited riches. But Ilavinirk used to maintain that the 
white men really had considerable native ability and that 
some of them were capable of becoming good winter trav- 
elers and even good hunters. I had heard him argue along 
those lines several times and now he had frequent talks 
with Kunaluak on this subject. Kunaluak maintained 



246 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

that white men had gifts of a certain kind entirely above 
the comprehension of an Eskimo, but that in such every- 
day matters as getting back safely to camp when it is 
dark and when you are ten miles away from home they 
are hopelessly incompetent. To illustrate their incom- 
petence in caribou hunting, he told stories of the adven- 
tures of sailors he had hunted with. We all had to join 
in the laughter. Ilavinirk was forced to admit the truth 
of the particular stories told by Kunaluak but he stoutly 
maintained that a few white men were exceptions to the 
rule. 

Privately Ilavinirk told me that I must not be too much 
impressed with what Kunaluak and all the rest were say- 
ing. He gave me careful instructions in all the laws of 
caribou hunting and encouraged me as best he could to 
think that I would be able to make a good showing when 
the time came. 

The time came just east of the Colville River. Kuna- 
luak was walking ahead of our caravan of sleds when 
suddenly he brought us to a halt. I had been watching 
the land no less carefully than he and I found later that 
my eyes were just as good, but I then lacked the exper- 
ience needed for identifying what I saw. I had seen a 
group of little specks on the hillside, but there were so 
many other specks elsewhere that I had given these no 
attention. Kunaluak's practiced eye recognized them as 
caribou, and when we stopped our field glasses confirmed 
him. There were nine animals, one a bull with spreading 
antlers, and the others of all sizes from yearlings up. 

It was important for us to get these caribou. We were 
not short of food for we had been killing seals, but we 
were inadequately dressed for the coming winter. Stork- 
erson's woolens and mine did very well for September, but 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT CARIBOU 247 

against November we needed the warm caribou clothes 
which the Eskimo women would make for us if we only 
could get skins out of which they could make them. 

We held a council. Kunaluak suggested that Storker- 
son and I should go with the Eskimo woman, child and 
dog teams the shortest distance towards the land and 
make camp while he and Ilavinirk went after the caribou, 
but Ilavinirk said that he wanted me to learn caribou 
hunting and that Storkerson and Mamayauk could easily 
make camp. Kunaluak demurred at first, saying that it 
was very important that no mistake should be made and 
that we get all the caribou. Like most Eskimos, he was 
kindness itself and was obviously of a divided mind be- 
tween the courtesy which prompted him to invite me to 
come along and the caution which urged him to get me to 
stay behind. But Ilavinirk and I had our way. 

Just as we were separating from the sledges, Mamay- 
auk pointed out that while we needed especially the skins 
of the younger caribou for our inner clothing we should 
also secure the bull if possible, for his thick hide was 
needed for the soles of our winter boots. As we walked 
along Kunaluak and Ilavinirk discussed this point. They 
decided to leave the killing of the bull until the last for at 
this season bulls are very thin and their meat is considered 
nearly unfit for use (except for dog food) and they are 
valued chiefly for the hide. So they agreed they would 
shoot the other eight animals and the bull last. 

We were still a mile away from the caribou, Kunaluak 
was walking rapidly and Ilavinirk and I dropped a little 
behind. He now told me that he had laid a trap for 
Kunaluak. Both of them had agreed not to shoot the 
bull until the last. Ilavinirk now told me to be sure to 
kill the bull while they were firing at the others. To his 



248 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

mind this would be a great joke on Kunaluak, for he had 
only that day been saying that he had known white men 
to fire many hundred shots at caribou and the only time 
he had known them to hit was when there were several 
caribou in a band and when a bullet intended for one had 
struck some other animal. 

It is sometimes difficult to approach caribou, but in 
this case it was easy for there was a little ridge about 
three hundred yards away from them. We crawled to 
the top of this ridge and found conditions ideal, except 
that twilight was stealing on and we could no longer see 
the sights of our rifles plainly. The eight caribou were 
strung out almost in a straight line at right angles to 
us, and the big bull was at some distance from the others. 
It was agreed that Kunaluak should begin shooting at 
the right hand end of the line and Ilavinirk at the left 
hand end. In this conversation the two Eskimos agreed 
that I was to shoot at the middle of the line, but Ilavinirk 
gave me a wink to remind me that I was not to shoot at 
the line at all but at the old bull. 

I think it took the Eskimos about twenty shots all 
together to kill six out of the eight animals, for two 
escaped. In the excitement of the shooting they had not 
been watching the bull. The other animals had been 
dashing round in various directions and in the half dark 
it would not have been strange if the bull which originally 
had been some distance away from them had got mixed 
up in the band without being noticed for in that light his 
antlers would not be conspicuous. When we went up 
to the dead caribou and found the bull to be one of them, 
Kunaluak said that Ilavinirk must have killed it for he 
felt sure that he had never aimed at any animal excepting 
a young one. Ilavinirk denied having shot the bull and 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT CARIBOU 249 

said he thought I had done so. This Kunaluak evidently 
took for an amiable fib on the part of Ilavinirk and so 
as not to hurt my feelings he did not argue against it. 
But when it came to the skinning, it turned out that the 
bull had a peculiar wound that could not have been caused 
by their black powder rifles and must have been caused 
by my more powerful soft-nosed bullet. This evidence 
compelled Kunaluak to admit that I had killed the bull. 
But he seemed to consider it only a lucky stray shot. 

A week later I had a chance about forty miles east of 
there to kill a caribou when I was off hunting alone. In 
that case there was no arguing as to who had been respon- 
sible. 

We were camped on the coast and had gone hunting in 
different directions. The Eskimos had invited me to go 
along with them but I had preferred to hunt alone. The 
weather was so beautiful that it was impossible to con- 
ceive of any one getting lost. The topography, too, was 
simple. The mountains were in sight inland and from 
any small hill the coastline could plainly be made out even 
when you were three or four miles inland. Our camp 
was perched conspicuously on a high cutbank and both 
the tent and the smoke could be seen from afar. Even 
a sailor ashore could not get lost in such country and such 
weather. It seemed to me a good chance to try myself 
out and see if I could really stand on my own feet. 

I had hunted inland seven or eight miles and had seen 
some caribou which I could not approach. The weather 
was very still, they heard my footfalls half a mile off 
and were gone. On my way back to the coast I noticed 
at a distance of two or three miles a small speck moving 
over the snow. My glasses showed this to be a big bull 
caribou. He was traveling in a straight line. I watched 



250 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

him carefully for about a mile and found that he was 
going to pass about half a mile from me. I then ran as 
hard as I could to a place I judged to be directly in his 
road and there I lay down. I was so badly out of breath 
that had he come along directly I should probably have 
missed him, but something induced him to stop for ten or 
fifteen minutes and when he finally came over the ridge 
about two hundred yards away from me I was over the 
worst effects of my running, although I am not sure that 
my hand was really steady. The magnificent animal 
crumpled up with the first bullet. That evening Kunal- 
uak did not argue that it had been a chance shot, but I 
am not sure but it was. 

From this time on I did my own hunting. I have 
usually been in command of the traveling parties and it 
has been optional with me what to do. Because hunting 
is pleasanter than taking care of the dog teams or building 
the camps, I have generally assigned the hunting to my- 
self while my Eskimo or white companions have had to 
do the harder and more difficult work. Still this has been 
not wholly because I was in command, but partly because 
many years of hunting have made me an expert in that 
line of work, just as any ordinary person can become an 
expert in anything through long practice. 

When you consider that an experienced hunter is an 
expert in a very simple task, you will not think it remark- 
able that we count on being able to secure at least three 
out of every four caribou we try to get. The same pro- 
portion applies to seals and polar bears. This is why we 
feel no hesitancy in making journeys of hundreds and 
even thousands of miles in the arctic regions, depending 
on hunting entirely for our food. If you read of travelers 
starving to death up there it will be through some special 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT CARIBOU 251 

misfortune, or else because they either did not try to hunt 
or else did not know well the technique of finding and 
securing game. 

A common mistake about caribou is to suppose that 
they are more difficult to hunt in districts where they are 
frequently hunted by people than in countries where they 
are never hunted at all. I find there is no such difference. 
The reason is simple. They have one great enemy, the 
wolf. On the prairies in the northern half of Canada and 
on the islands to the north of Canada there are many mil- 
lions of caribou. Some say there are ten million all 
together and some say there are thirty million. In these 
great herds there must be born every year anything from 
two million to six million calves. The number of caribou 
killed by human beings in all of northern Canada is far 
less than one million per year. Accordingly, the caribou 
would increase very rapidly were it not for the wolves 
which kill several times as many as do the human hunters 
— Indian, Eskimo and white. Wolves are found wherever 
caribou are found and the caribou are in continual dread 
of them. They are, therefore, almost equally harried in 
countries that are uninhabited by men as in countries 
that are inhabited. I have, accordingly, found that 
even in the remote new islands which we discovered in 
1915 caribou are about as difficult to approach as in 
northern Alaska or on the Canadian mainland where they 
are continually hunted by Eskimos. 

Apart from the islands actually discovered by my 
expedition, there is no known country in the northern 
hemisphere that has been so little visited as Isachsen 
Land in north latitude 79 °, west longitude 103 . We 
feel sure that no Eskimos ever saw that island. From 
the beginning of the world to our time it had been visited 



252 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

only once — by Captain Isachsen in 1901. Isachsen made 
a hurried sledge trip around the island. The journey 
took him about a week. In one place he saw some cari- 
bou tracks and I think he may have seen some caribou at 
a distance, but he did not try to hunt them. The next 
visitors were my sledge party in 191 6 and on that occasion 
we saw no caribou and had to feed ourselves and our dogs 
entirely on seals. 

My second visit, and the third visit of human beings 
to the island, was in 191 7. We were then on the most 
dangerous adventure that has ever fallen to our lot. By 
the road we had to travel we were some five hundred miles 
away from the nearest Eskimos and six hundred miles 
away from our own base camp. Four of us had been on 
a long journey out on the moving sea ice to the northwest. 
When we were more than a hundred miles northwest from 
Isachsen Land, two of my three companions were taken 
seriously ill. We turned towards shore immediately and 
it was a hard fight to make land. When we got there 
after a struggle of two weeks we found ourselves with one 
man so sick that he could not walk, another who could 
barely walk but was of no use otherwise, and with two 
teams of dogs that were exhausted with hard work 
and so thin from short rations during the forced march 
towards shore that they were little more than skeletons. 
It had been my pride through many years never to lose a 
dog. Furthermore, I was exceedingly fond of every one 
of these dogs for they had worked for me faithfully for 
years. I was concerned for their safety, and still more 
concerned for the safety of the sick men. By that time, 
however, my confidence in our ability to make a living 
in the Arctic had become so strong through eight years 
of experience that I felt more worry for the lives of the 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT CARIBOU 253 

men on the score of illness than for fear they might 
actually die of hunger. 

But the first day on Isachsen Land was a depressing 
contradiction to my hopes and expectations. The one 
man in good health and the two men who were sick had 
to make their way as best they could along the coast while 
I hunted inland parallel to their course. I walked that 
day twenty miles across one of the very few stretches of 
entirely barren land that I have seen in the Arctic. 
Under foot was gravel without a blade of grass. Much 
of the land was lightly covered with snow as in other 
typical arctic lands in winter, and I looked in vain in the 
snow for track or other sign of any living thing. 

That evening my men were depressed partly because 
of their illness and also because it looked as if we had 
at last come into a region as barren as many people think 
the polar countries generally are. It was clear that if we 
saw game the next day we would simply have to have it. 
Where game is plentiful, you may lose one chance and 
soon get another; but where it is scarce, you must not 
allow any opportunity to slip through your fingers. 

I am telling this particular hunting story rather than 
any other to illustrate the principle of how you must hunt 
caribou in the polar regions if it is essential that you shall 
get every animal you see. It certainly was essential in 
this case, for I wanted not only to stave off immediate 
hunger but to secure meat enough so we could camp in one 
place for several weeks to give the sick men a chance to 
become well. 

Our second day on Isachsen Land the men again fol- 
lowed the coast line with the sledges, cutting across the 
shortest distance from point to point while I walked a 
much longer course inland. I had gone but a few 



254 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

miles when I came upon the tracks of a band of caribou. 
You can seldom be sure of the minimum number in a 
band from the tracks if there are more than ten animals, 
for caribou have a way of stepping in each other's foot- 
prints. There are always likely to be more animals in a 
band than you have been able to make out from the 
tracks. 

The trail showed that these caribou were traveling into 
the wind as they usually do. There were only light airs 
and the snow had on it a crust that broke underfoot with 
a crunching noise. Under such conditions the band were 
likely to hear me four or five hundred yards away. The 
country now was a rolling prairie — not barren gravel as 
yesterday. It was impossible to tell which ridge might 
hide the caribou from me, so instead of following the trail 
ahead I went back along it for about half a mile studying 
the tracks to see just how fast they had been moving. 
They had been traveling in a leisurely way and feeding 
here and there. I estimated their average rate of pro- 
gress would not be more than three or four miles per day. 
I could not rely on this, however, for a wolf may turn up 
any time and begin a pursuit which takes a band twenty- 
five or fifty miles away. Should a wolf pass to windward 
of them so that they got his smell without his knowing 
about them, they would be likely to run from five to ten 
miles. 

When I had made up my mind that these caribou were 
moving slowly, I went to the top of a nearby hill and 
through my glasses studied the landscape carefully. 
With good luck I might have seen some of them on top 
of some hill and the problem would have become definite. 
But I watched for half an hour and saw nothing. Clearly 
they were either feeding in some low place or else they 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT CARIBOU 255 

were lying down, for caribou are like cattle in their habit 
of lying down for long periods. I now commenced a 
cautious advance, not along the actual trail but crisscros- 
sing it from high hilltop to high hilltop, hoping to get a 
view of the animals while they were at least half a mile 
from me and while I was beyond the range of their eye- 
sight, for they cannot see a man under even the most 
favorable conditions farther off than half a mile. Under 
ordinary conditions they would not see you much beyond 
a quarter of a mile. 

Finally I saw the band lying quietly on some flat land. 
There was no cover to enable me to approach safely 
within five hundred yards and that is too far for good 
shooting. I thought these might be the only caribou in 
the whole country. We had thirteen hungry dogs and 
two sick men, and now that I had a large band before me 
it was my business to get enough food at one time to en- 
able us to spend at that place two or three weeks while 
the men had a chance to regain their health and the dogs 
to regain their flesh and strength. 

On a calm day when caribou can hear you farther than 
you can shoot, there is only one method of hunting. You 
must study their movements from afar until you make up 
your mind which direction they are going. Then you 
must walk in a wide curve around them until you are in 
the locality towards which they are moving and well 
beyond earshot. This takes judgment, for they usually 
travel nearly or quite into the wind and you must not 
allow them to scent you. You, therefore, have to choose 
a place which you think is near enough to their course so 
that they will pass within shooting distance, and still 
not directly enough in front so that they can smell 
you. 



256 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

On this occasion the glaring light on the snow had been 
so hard on my eyes that I did not feel they were in perfect 
condition, and no one can shoot well if his eyes are not 
right. Unless there is a change of wind caribou are not 
likely to turn their course back along the trail by which 
they have come. I accordingly selected a hill across 
which they had walked that morning and half a mile away 
from where they now were. On the top of this hill where 
I could see them, although they could not see me (because 
my eyes were better than theirs) I lay down, covered my 
head with a canvas hunting bag to keep the sun away, and 
went to sleep. Sleeping is the best possible way of pass- 
ing time, but my object now was not only to pass the time 
until the caribou began moving but also to get my eyes 
into perfect condition. 

When you go to sleep at twenty below zero you have in 
the temperature an automatic alarm clock. My clothes 
were amply warm enough to keep me comfortable while I 
was awake, but I knew that when I went to sleep my 
circulation would slow down. This reduces the body 
temperature and the same weather that will not chill you 
when you are awake will chill you enough to wake you 
from a sleep. 

In this case the chill woke me in about half an hour 
to an unpleasant situation. A fog had set in and I could 
not see the caribou, nor had I any means of knowing 
whether they were still lying down or whether they had 
started to move. If this had been a good game country, 
I might have taken chances on advancing through the fog 
a little, but I was so impressed with the possibility that 
these were the only animals within a hundred miles that 
carelessness was not to be considered. At this time of year 
we had twenty-four hours of daylight. The fog was 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT CARIBOU 257 

bound to lift sooner or later and whenever it did I would 
commence the hunt over again. 

The fog did lift in about two hours and I did have to 
commence the hunt all over again, for the caribou were 
gone. I was to the north of them and I felt sure that they 
had not gone by near me; so they must have gone east, 
west or south. I was probably so near them that I could 
not with safety go on top of any of the adjoining hills, so I 
went back north half a mile and climbed a high hill there. 
From that hill I saw nothing and went half a mile to one 
side to another hill. Then I saw the caribou. They 
were now feeding half a mile south of where they had been 
when the fog covered them up. In the meantime the 
breeze had stiffened enough so that now there was no 
longer danger of my being heard. I did not, therefore, 
have to circle them and lie in wait in front but could 
follow up directly behind. 

Eventually I got within about three hundred yards. 
But I wanted to get within two hundred, so I lay still and 
waited for them to move into a more favorable locality. 
During my wait an exceedingly thick fog bank rolled up, 
but with it the wind did not slacken. Under cover of 
this fog I felt safe in crawling ahead a hundred yards, 
for I knew that I could see through the fog quite as well 
as the animals and that they could not hear me because of 
the wind. The reason I had not approached them in the 
previous fog was that the weather then had been nearly 
calm and they would have heard me. 

At two hundred yards I was just able to make out the 
outline of the nearest caribou. I did not dare to go closer 
and, of course, I could not begin shooting with only one 
or two animals in sight where I wanted to get them all. 
I had before now counted them carefully. There were 



258 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

twenty-one, which I estimated would be enough to feed 
our men and dogs between two or three weeks, giving 
them a chance to recuperate. 

After about half an hour the fog began gradually to 
clear and in another half hour I could see all the animals. 
I was near the top of a hill and they were in a hollow, 
the nearest of them about a hundred and fifty yards 
away and the farthest about three hundred. 

In winter the ground in any cold country will split in 
what we call frost cracks. These are cracks in the frozen 
surface of what in summer is mud. They are ordinarily 
only half an inch or so wide but I have seen cracks four 
or five inches wide. These cracks form when the mer- 
cury is dropping and with a noise that resembles a rifle 
shot. Under the same conditions the ice on the small 
lakes cracks similarly. These loud noises are so 
familiar to the caribou and the report of a rifle is so 
similar that the mere sound of a rifle does not scare 
them. Of course, we have smokeless powder so they 
cannot see where the shots come from. What does scare 
them is the whistle of the bullet and the thud as it strikes 
the ground. It is instinctive with all animals to run 
directly away from the source of any noise that frightens 
them. It is another instinct of caribou when they are 
alarmed to run towards the center of the herd. A band 
that has been scattered feeding will bunch up when they 
take fright. When you know these two principles, it is 
obvious that the first caribou to kill is the one farthest 
away from you. On some occasions when I have been 
unable to get within good shooting distance of a band, 
I have commenced by firing a few shots into a hill on 
the other side of them, hoping that the noise of the 
striking bullets would scare them towards me. Fre- 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT CARIBOU 259 

quently it works. On this occasion, however, I merely 
took careful aim at an animal about three hundred yards 
away. It dropped so instantaneously that although the 
sound of the bullet striking it induced the other caribou 
to look up, they recognized no sign of real danger. They 
were, however, alert and when they saw the second 
caribou fall they ran together into a group and moved 
somewhat towards me. I now shot animals on the outer 
margin of the group and as each fell, the others would 
run a little away from that one. Their retreat in any 
direction was stopped by killing the foremost animal in 
the retreat, whereupon the band would turn in the oppo- 
site direction. 

It would not have been difficult for me to kill the 
whole band alone, but I was not shooting alone. From 
a point somewhat above and behind me I could hear 
other shots, and some animals I was not aiming at were 
dropping. Without looking around I knew what this 
meant. My companions traveling along shore on the ice 
had seen the caribou and had waited for some time until 
they began to fear that I might have missed the band. 
The two sick men had then been left behind in camp 
while their Eskimo companion had come inland to try 
to get the caribou. When he got near he saw that I was 
approaching them and very wisely did not interfere. 
There is nothing so likely to spoil a caribou hunt as two 
hunters whose plans conflict. Even when they have a 
chance to consult at the beginning of the hunt, two men 
are less likely to be successful than one. For one thing, 
caribou may see a black dot on the landscape and take 
no warning from it, but if they see two black dots and 
later notice that they are either closer together or farther 
apart than they were a moment before, this makes a 



2 6o HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

danger signal which they understand. That is the main 
reason why I always hunt alone. If there are two 
hunters to go out from the same camp on any given 
day, they should go in opposite directions. That way 
they double the chance of finding game and each has a 
fair chance of getting the animals he does find. 

On our journeys we never kill more animals than we 
need, but in this case we needed the whole twenty-one. 
The Eskimo and I went down to the ice with my hunting 
bag filled with the tongues of the caribou. This gave 
the sick men a more appetizing meat than they had had 
for a long time. The dogs had to wait for their food 
until we were able to move camp right to where the 
caribou had been shot. Although they were thin and 
tired, they became so excited with the smell of the fresh 
killed caribou which they got from our clothes that they 
pulled towards shore as if they had been well fed and 
of full strength. 

On the hill from which I had shot the caribou we 
pitched camp. During the next two weeks the invalids 
rapidly gained in health. We called the place Camp 
Hospital. Few hospitals have ever been more successful. 
When we left it three weeks later, the dogs were fat and 
the men well. 



CHAPTER II 

HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS 

Some Eskimos make a living almost entirely by hunting 
seals, and I have had to do the same occasionally. The 
seal is the most useful of animals because it furnishes 
all you really need for living in comfort. 

The lean and fat of the seal make together a diet upon 
which whole groups of Eskimos live in good health to 
a reasonably old age. On some of my later expeditions 
my white companions and I have lived exclusively on 
seals for months at a time. Some people do not like the 
meat at first just because it differs considerably from any 
meat with which they are familiar; but you gradually 
get to like it, and the longer you live on it the better you 
like it. You may be dreadfully tired of seal after three 
weeks, or even three months, but I never saw any one 
who was tired of it after three years. It is in living with 
the Eskimos on seals as it is in living with the Chinese 
on rice that no matter how much you dislike it at first, 
you are likely eventually to become as fond of it as they 
are themselves. 

In addition to giving meat and fat for food the seal 
furnishes fat for fuel. Many thousands of Eskimos have 
no other fuel in winter, and it does them very well. 
They burn the fat in stone lamps made for the purpose. 
These are carefully trimmed and should not smoke. A 
woman is considered a very bad housekeeper if you can 
notice the smell of lamp smoke in her house or see 

261 



262 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

stains of lamp soot on her hands, or on anything in the 
house. The first real Eskimo house in which I lived (at 
Tuktuyaktok) usually had four seal oil lamps burning, 
maintaining the temperature of the interior, day and 
night, steadily between 70 ° and 80 °. We had a wood 
stove which we used for cooking only, but many Eskimos 
cook entirely over their lamps. This serves well, but 
takes a little longer. 

Besides food and fuel, the seal furnishes clothing. The 
Eskimos use water boots in summer that are made en- 
tirely of seal skin, and in winter they use caribou skin 
boots which in some cases have seal skin soles. Rain 
coats are -made of seal skin and so are mittens intended 
to be used in handling fishnets or anything that is wet. 
Coats and trousers for winter may be made of seal skin, 
but this is seldom done except when caribou are scarce. 

Whalers, traders and explorers have for a century been 
in contact with the Eskimos in Greenland, even as far 
north as Smith Sound where the most remote of them 
live. These people buy canvas and other tents from 
traders and so do all the Eskimos of Alaska — and, indeed, 
all the Eskimos in the world except some small groups 
that are especially inaccessible because they are in the 
middle of the north coast of North America halfway 
between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. These small 
groups still use skin tents and they are of seal skin in 
districts where seals are more abundant than caribou. 

Lastly, seal skins furnish material for boats. The 
small seals are used for the kayaks and the big seals for 
the umiaks. 

I like to travel with Eskimo companions, but I never 
liked to feel that I was wholly dependent upon them. 
Being helpless is never pleasant. To become self-sup- 




A Woman Fishing Through the Ice 




Bringing Home a Seal 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS 263 

porting, nothing was so important as to learn seal hunt- 
ing, for then I could supply myself with food, fuel, 
clothing and, if need be, material for a tent or a boat. 

It is said that experience is the best teacher; but she 
is a slow and painful teacher. Any one at all intelligent 
or thoughtful can learn without experience, or rather 
from the experience of others. That is why we have so 
many schools and that is why they are so useful. I am 
a great believer in schools and like to learn things by 
being taught. I therefore asked the Eskimos to explain 
to me just how they hunted seals. They told me clearly 
and fully. If I were to repeat what they said, I should 
give a description of seal hunting from which any one 
could learn the principles so well that he could hunt seals 
successfully the first time he found himself in the polar 
regions. But I found later that while the Eskimos had 
told me the whole truth they had told me a great deal 
more than the truth. They are a kind and charming 
people; but they are very superstitious, and about half 
the things they told me I would have to do in order to 
hunt seals successfully I have since found were pure 
superstition. Seal hunting is very much simpler than any 
Eskimo will ever tell you; for he tells you how he hunts 
seals, and half the things he does while hunting are done 
merely because his father and grandfather before him 
always did them that way. 

So instead of telling how Eskimos hunt seals, I shall 
tell how I do it and how the other white men do it who 
(on my various expeditions) have accompanied me when 
we were living on seals. 

On my first expedition (1906-07) I was in a fishing 
country and never saw a caribou or a seal. On my 
second expedition (1908-12) I was nearly the whole time 



264 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

in a caribou country and lived mainly on caribou. 
Furthermore, my Eskimo companions at that time had 
been brought up as caribou hunters, and if they knew 
how to hunt seals they did not care much about it. One 
of them, Natkusiak, came from Cape Prince of Wales in 
Alaska and had learned sealing as a boy. He had ex- 
plained to me how it was done and I felt sure I could do 
it whenever the need arose. But the need never came 
until in May, 19 12, when he and I were making a 
1000-mile sledge journey from Langton Bay to Point 
Barrow. We were on the last lap — the 400-mile stretch 
between Herschel and Barrow. 

We could have carried almost enough groceries to last 
us the trip from Herschel to Barrow but we did not like 
to because such a heavy load would have lessened our 
speed. So we took only about one-quarter of what we 
needed, expecting to live mainly by hunting. This was 
the best time of the year for sealing on top of the ice, and 
Natkusiak assured me he would be able to get all the 
seals necessary to feed ourselves and our dogs. 

But soon after we started west from Herschel Island 
he began to complain about a pain in one of his fingers. 
This developed into a felon and the pain became so 
intense that he could not sleep at night. He could not 
even ride on the sled daytimes for the jarring hurt too 
much. Delay was out of the question for we had to 
reach Point Barrow before the summer heat turned into 
water the sea ice we were traveling over, so he used to 
walk along slowly and as carefully as he could, carry- 
ing his afflicted left hand in front of him supported by 
his right. Crippled as he was he could not hunt seals, so 
I had to do it. 

I felt I understood the theory and that I should be 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS 265 

able to kill my first seal. The principle was simple. You 
had to go on the assumption that the seal would see you 
when you were far away. Your task was to approach 
him slowly, crawling along the ice like a seal and 
making him think all the while that you were another 
seal. Natkusiak had explained to me both by words and 
mimicry how this should be done. But I did not want to 
make any mistake with my first seal, and thinking that 
possibly the seals themselves might know even better 
than Natkusiak how a seal acts, I decided to find out from 
them just how they do act. 

That was a simple matter. The eyesight of seals is 
not very good, and when they are lying sunning them- 
selves on the level ice they cannot see you much beyond 
four hundred yards. With this in mind I watched for 
seals as we traveled, climbing on top of ice hummocks 
now and then and examining the ocean with my field 
glasses. Finally we saw a seal lying on the ice ahead of 
us. We made camp about half a mile from him. I then 
went to the top of an ice hummock and studied him 
carefully through my glasses. Previous to this I had 
often watched seals and had checked them with my watch 
to find out how long at a time they sleep. I found that 
they take short naps, but that their waking spells be- 
tween the naps are even shorter. I learned that while 
on top of the ice the average Alaskan seal sleeps about 
seven times as much as he stays awake. The average 
length of his naps was about thirty-five seconds and the 
average length of the waking periods between was about 
five seconds. 

It may seem strange to those unfamiliar with the lives 
of the arctic seals that they should sleep so fitfully. 
Nothing else would do, however. If they slept thirty 



266 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

minutes at a time instead of thirty seconds, there soon 
would be no seals left. They would all get killed and 
eaten by the polar bears. 

The polar bear is the great enemy of the seal. He 
is white in color and difficult for the seal to see at a 
distance. He is also a very skillful hunter. Eternal 
watchfulness is, therefore, the price of a seal's being able 
to live at all. Accordingly, he usually goes to sleep on 
large expanses of level ice so as to give the bear no 
opportunity to creep up behind the cover of a hummock. 
Then after the briefest nap, during which the seal sleeps 
like a small boy on a lawn, he lifts his head as high as 
he can above the ice (about eighteen inches) and surveys 
the whole horizon carefully. Having satisfied himself 
that nothing dangerous is in sight, he takes another nap. 
While the average nap is thirty seconds, the seal may lift 
his head suddenly after five seconds of pretended sleep, 
or possibly after a real nap of fifteen seconds. They 
seldom sleep more than a minute at a time, but north of 
Prince Patrick Island, where we never saw polar bear 
tracks, I have known them to sleep five or even ten 
minutes at a time. 

All these things I had heard already, but I wanted 
further confirmation of them and I wanted to learn 
certain finer details of how to act. Watching the seal 
through my glasses, I noticed that he was seldom still for 
a moment. He was continually squirming and rubbing 
himself against the ice as if he were itching. Occasion- 
ally he would scratch his side with one of his front flip- 
pers. The front flippers are short and inconvenient for 
that purpose, but the hind flippers are long and flexible 
and he can curl himself up in such a way that he can 
scratch with them as far up as his waist. I concluded, 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS 267 

therefore, (and long experience has verified it) that when 
I came to play seal it would be advisable for me to squirm 
and scratch myself as I had seen him doing. 

When my hour of study was over, I began the hunt 
with every rule in mind which Natkusiak had given me 
and not forgetful of the things I had just learned by 
watching. Knowing that he could not see more than at 
most five hundred yards, I walked to a spot directly to 
the leeward of him five hundred yards away. I now saw 
that the ice between him and me was not quite level. 
This would be bad, for if he once saw me I must keep in 
sight all the time. If I had any hollows in the ice to 
crawl over, I should disappear from his sight occasionally 
and this might scare him. I therefore stepped a few 
yards to one side and examined the ice between him and 
me with the glasses. This was still hummocky, so I 
kept going a little more to one side until I found that all 
the ice in a direct line to the seal was level. Then I com- 
menced the approach. 

It may seem that it would be advisable to dress in 
white clothing for this sort of hunt. That would be the 
worst thing you could do. The seal is continually watch- 
ing for polar bears. If he sees something that is suspicious 
and white, he takes it to be a polar bear and dives into 
his water hole at once. The seals themselves are grey 
and when they have just come out of the water their sleek 
sides look black at a distance. The hunter may, there- 
fore, wear any color between grey and black. I have 
used blue and it seems the seal cannot distinguish between 
this and black. Green I have never tried because I never 
had green clothes, nor have I heard of it being tried. 
Eskimos have told me that red will not do, and that seems 
reasonable. I have tried to get at seals when dressed in 



268 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

white, but have never succeeded except when I have been 
able to shield myself behind some cover. 

So long as you are more than three hundred yards 
away from the seal you need not be careful. He might 
see you at four hundred yards if you were upright, but 
you should begin crawling somewhat before the four 
hundred-yard mark is reached. I crawl ahead on all 
fours while he is asleep, and when he wakes up I drop 
flat instantly and remain motionless until he goes to sleep 
again. This sort of approach will do until you are about 
three hundred yards away, but after that you must be 
more careful for he now may see you at any time. 

When I felt myself well within the seal's range of 
vision, I began to crawl ahead seal-fashion, which prac- 
tically means snake-fashion. I moved as rapidly as I 
could while he slept and I stopped motionless while he 
was awake until finally, at a distance of 175 yards, he 
saw me. 

It was easy to tell when the seal first saw me. He 
stiffened up suddenly, lifted his head a little higher than 
ordinary and crawled a foot or two nearer his water hole 
so as to be able to dive instantly if necessary. Being 
now in what he thought a safe position himself and con- 
sidering me so far away that there was no immediate 
danger, he watched me carefully. Had I remained 
motionless for two or three minutes, he would have be- 
come restive, and in a few minutes more he would have 
dived into his hole, for he knew very well that no real 
seal would remain motionless for long. Accordingly, I 
waited until he had been watching me about half a 
minute, which is the average sleeping spell of a seal. I 
then did my best to act like a seal waking up. I lifted 
my head about eighteen inches above the ice, looked 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS &6g 

around in all directions, and moved as if I were squirm- 
ing seal-fashion on the ice. After spending about five 
seconds looking around, I allowed my head to drop on 
the ice. I then counted ten of my breaths and raised 
my head a second time, dropping it after a suitable inter- 
val. Occasionally I would flex my legs at the knee so 
as to imitate a seal scratching with his hind flippers. 

In about ten or fifteen minutes of this sort of acting 
I had the seal convinced that I was another seal. After 
that the whole thing was easy. I have since found by 
long experience that most of the seals you lose are lost 
at this critical time. It may be that they are of a 
specially nervous temperament, perhaps they have had 
a narrow escape from a bear just recently, or possibly 
they may have been lying up on the ice so long that they 
are hungry and ready to dive into the sea in search of 
the next meal. I should say that one seal out of four 
will dive at this stage, no matter how good a seal hunter 
you are. To lose a seal that way is nobody's fault. If 
you lose him thereafter, it is your fault or because some 
accident happens. It may be that a sudden gust of wind 
flaps your clothing so that he notices it. There is nothing 
about a real seal that flaps in the wind, so he will rec- 
ognize this as a danger sign. Possibly you may make 
some loud noise by carelessly breaking a snag of thin 
ice. Still, that should do no more than make him sus- 
picious over again for seals do break ice snags sometimes, 
and a few minutes of playing seal should put him at his 
ease. 

I do not know how to explain it, but a seal certainly 
cannot tell a man from a seal by merely looking at him 
even at so short a distance as five yards. But if he is 
stupid as to a man's appearance, he is very keen as to 



270 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

his actions. When within ten or fifteen yards of a seal 
you must mind your P's and Q's very strictly or he will 
detect the fraud. 

I am inclined to think that the seal's inability to detect 
the trick that is being played on him is not due to simple 
stupidity, but is rather self-deception — auto-suggestion. 
He has made up his mind that you are a seal; and once 
made up, a seal's mind stays made up. There is nothing 
fickle about a seal. 

In the case of my first seal I was 175 yards from him 
when I got him convinced that I was a seal. When 
eventually he began to take his regular alternate naps 
and waking spells, I began a systematic advance, moving 
ahead while he slept and stopping motionless while he 
was awake. If at any time he watched me as much as 
half a minute at a time I played seal some more by lift- 
ing my head to show I was awake or by bending my 
legs at the knees to pretend that I was scratching. 

Eskimos sometimes crawl within five yards of a seal 
before throwing a harpoon and I have known of them 
crawling so close that they could seize him by a flipper 
with one hand and stab him with a knife with the other. 
This is done only to show off their skill as hunters or else 
in an emergency when the rifle or sealing harpoon has 
been lost or forgotten at home. I ordinarily crawl within 
about fifty yards and did so in this case. Then I waited 
until the seal raised his head, took a careful aim and shot 
him through the brain. Next I dropped my rifle on the 
ice and ran at top speed to catch him, for although he 
was dead there was still a chance of my not getting him. 
He was lying on a slippery incline of ice so near his hole 
that the mere shock when the bullet struck might start 
him sliding. It had started him, and I got there just in 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS 271 

time to seize a hind flipper as he was gliding into the 
water. On other occasions I have had to slide for a dead 
seal as a runner in baseball slides for a base. Some- 
times I have just caught the seal and sometimes I have 
just missed him. In a few cases he has slid so rapidly 
that I was no more than halfway from the shooting place 
to his hole when he disappeared. 

Three seals out of four have buoyancy enough to float, 
but if they slide into the water the momentum gathered by 
slipping off the ledge of ice is enough to send them 
diagonally down into the water fifteen or twenty feet. 
They come up diagonally under the ice. The ice may 
be as much as seven feet thick and you do not know 
exactly where they are. We, therefore, consider that a 
seal is lost if he once slips into his hole, and we do not 
even try to search. 

In about one case in a hundred the dead seal may rise in 
the hole. It is, therefore, worth while to stand by for two 
or three minutes on a chance that he has sunk vertically 
and that he will come back up vertically. 

It would be easy to shoot a seal at a distance greater 
than fifty yards, but experience shows that this is waste- 
ful. If you have a hundred yards to run the seal's dead 
body has at least an even chance of sliding in before 
you get there. It takes so much cautious effort to get 
within a hundred yards of a seal that you had better not 
spoil it all by shooting until you are nearer. Further- 
more, nothing will do but a brain shot or one through the 
spine at the base of the brain. If there is the least life 
in the animal, a wiggle will send him into his hole. 

I have spoken of the seal's hole without describing it 
for that is more easily done in connection with an account 
of our second method of hunting. The way already 



272 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

described the Alaskan Eskimos call the auktok or crawl- 
ing method. We occasionally kill seals by the more 
ingenious mauttok or waiting method. 

In most of Alaska the mauttok method is now only a 
tradition. The older men in the Mackenzie district know 
the theory but I have never seen them use it. My first 
experience with mauttok hunting came in 1910 when I 
was with the Copper Eskimos in Coronation Gulf. 

Through the eyes of a southerner nothing can be a 
more desolate or more hopeless desert so far as food is 
concerned than the level expanse of winter ice along the 
polar coast. If the coast is open as in northern Alaska, 
you can go five or ten miles to seaward and find a place 
where the wind has broken the ice and where the cakes 
are in motion. Here you will find seals swimming about 
in the water like bathers in a pond, and the tracks of 
polar bears that live on the seals may meet you anywhere. 
But in places like Coronation Gulf there is land on every 
side and the ice does not move from November, when 
it forms, until the following June or July, when it 
eventually breaks up some two months after summer and 
green grass have come upon all the surrounding lands. 
There are no polar bear tracks on this ice except in rare 
years, and no obvious sign indicates the presence of game. 

We were in a village on the level ice some ten miles 
from shore. There were twelve or fifteen snowhouses 
with two families in some and one in others. The 
population of the village was around fifty, among whom 
there were about fifteen able-bodied hunters. A few men 
were too old and stayed at home for that reason; and 
boys do not hunt seals until they are nearly grown. 

Around mid-winter we have on a clear day in Coron- 
ation Gulf about six hours of hunting light. At that 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS 273 

time of year the hunters must arise before dawn, have 
their breakfast of seal meat and start out on the ice with 
the earliest light. When I had my first lesson in the 
mauttok hunt the conditions did not differ except that it 
was spring with daylight at night — or with no night, if 
you prefer to put it that way. Each man took with him 
a dog in leash and our trails led away from the village 
in all directions like the spokes of a wheel. The ex- 
perienced hunters went singly, each with a dog, but I 
accompanied my host for I knew the hunting method 
only from description and before trying it I wanted to 
see how it was actually carried out. 

Salt ice is sticky. On a lake there may be patches 
of bare ice where the wind has swept the snow away, but 
this can scarcely occur on the ocean for a certain amount 
of snow must adhere to the sticky surface of the ice. As 
a matter of fact, there was a fairly uniform layer of 
snow everywhere. It varied from something like six 
inches in most places to a depth of several feet if drifts 
had been piling up in the lee of a snag of ice where a 
fracture of the surface had taken place in some autumn 
gale. We walked slowly as if strolling at leisure. Our 
dog was mildly excited for he knew there was food to be 
secured. He would, therefore, tug on his leading string 
and walk ahead of his master, pulling him this way and 
that. Now and then he would stop and sniff at the snow. 
I thought then that this was the result of his special 
training, but I know now that any dog of keen scent will 
do about as he did. I should imagine that a spaniel or 
bloodhound from a southern country would make a good 
sealing dog the very first day. 

We had gone about a mile when the dog stopped to 
sniff carefully on a drift about two feet in depth. This 



274 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

meant he might have found a seal hole and with a cane 
we poked around in the snow for a while. The scent 
proved false, for all we found were signs that a fox had 
been there earlier in the winter. 

The first indication having proved worthless, we con- 
tinued our zigzag stroll. Half a mile further on the dog 
stopped again to sniff and his master probed into the 
snowdrift with his cane. After a dozen or two stabs, 
each of which met the solid ice below, the cane went 
deeper than before. It had struck the seal's breathing 
hole and slipped through into the water beneath. 

This snowdrift was comparatively soft. The hunter 
now put his foot upon the snow just where he had dis- 
covered the seal's hole and pressed down the snow firmly. 
He then took from his hunting kit an ivory rod about 
as big round as a knitting needle and twice as long. This 
rod had a little disc on one end of it the size of a ten- 
cent piece, or smaller. At the other end of the rod was 
an eyelet through which was threaded a string about a 
foot long fastened to a sort of ivory pin. Through the 
hole made by his cane the hunter now stuck down his 
ivory probe so that the end with the disc on it was a 
few inches below the surface of the water in the seal's 
hole. Then he packed enough loose snow around the 
probe so that it did not slip in further. He then stuck 
the pin into the snow about a foot away. This pre- 
caution was taken so that the hunting contrivance should 
not be lost when it came to spearing the seal. 

It is now time to explain how the seal happened to 
be living just here under the ice. The preceding autumn 
had found him and all the other seals of the neighborhood 
swimming around freely in open water. Then the first 
frosts had come and young ice had formed one night. 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS 275 

First this ice was so weak that the seal could come up 
whenever he liked and break it by bumping his head 
against it. He had to do this several times an hour, for 
a seal has to breath the free air occasionally. He is not 
a fish with gills that can take oxygen from the water, 
but a mammal that breathes through nostrils like a dog. 

The fresh water ice with which most of us are familiar is 
transparent like window glass and almost as hard, but 
the thinnest sea ice is never transparent. In appearance 
it is more like ground glass which lets the light through 
although you cannot see through it. Another difference 
is that fresh ice is so strong that a big man can walk 
around safely on a pond covered by an inch of it. An 
inch of salt ice would not support a puppy, and children 
cannot play safely on three inches of it. Where lake ice 
is like glass, sea ice is like ice cream until it finally 
hardens and toughens with increasing thickness. We do 
not consider it safe to travel with a dog team and loaded 
sledge over sea ice less than six inches in thickness. Once 
we broke through and came near losing all our belongings 
crossing a stretch of ice five and three-quarters inches 
thick. We knew the danger and had taken the risk be- 
cause the strip was only a few yards wide and we thought 
we could hurry across in safety. Our dogs did get across 
and the ice broke just as the front end of our sled touched 
the solid floe, so that only the back end of the sled got 
into the water. We would have lost the whole load had 
the ice broken when the sled was two feet farther away 
from the floe. 

This mushiness of the sea ice in the fall enables the 
seals to continue their travels in the ocean underneath it 
until a thickness of four inches has been attained. After 
that they can no longer smash their way up to the air, 



276 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

and so they have to gnaw their way up. The teeth of a 
seal look like the teeth of a dog, but they are far enough 
forward in his jaw so he can gnaw with them almost as 
well as a rat can gnaw. In the manner of a rat making 
a hole through a board the seal now makes a hole through 
the ice just big enough to stick his nostrils up against 
to breathe. In some cases this hole is not over half 
an inch in diameter, although it may be an inch or more. 

Now the seal is confined to this vicinity. He may dive 
down fifty feet or so, searching for a fish or something 
else to eat, but he has to come up to the hole every now 
and then for a breath of air. 

For convenience, or possibly because he has nothing 
better to do, the seal will make in the vicinity half a dozen 
or a dozen other breathing holes exactly like the first 
As the ice gradually thickens to six inches, a foot, two 
feet, four feet, and even six or seven feet at a maximum, 
the seal has to keep busy gnawing away to keep open 
as many of the holes as he desires. His object is to be 
able to press his nostrils against a little hole at the very 
surface of the ice. To do this, he has to make in connec- 
tion with each hole a cigar-shaped vertical chamber big 
enough to admit his whole body. This must mean a 
great deal of work, but perhaps it helps him to pass the 
time away. 

Soon after the autumn freeze-up, the snow is bound to 
come and cover up all the breathing holes. This is 
evidently what the seal wants, for in rare instances some 
eddy of wind, caused perhaps by an ice hummock not far 
away, will keep free of snow the particular spot where 
the seal has one of his holes. Such a hole he always 
abandons because the freezing is more rapid where the 
ice is not blanketed by snow, or else perhaps because he 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS 277 

sees danger in the exposed nature of this breathing place. 

Whether the snow covering the air hole is four inches 
or four feet, it is granular and porous and the seal is able 
to suck in air through it to breathe. 

My Eskimo friend had now discovered one of these 
breathing holes. He knew it was only one of several. 
If there were only one breathing hole to each seal, the 
hunter would be bound to get him in a few minutes; but 
there are many holes and it is a matter of chance whether 
the seal is using just the one you have discovered. In 
our case, he was evidently using some other hole for we 
stood there half the day and nothing happened. We were 
both s© warmly dressed that although the temperature 
was about 40 ° below zero we did not feel cold even 
when standing still. 

I got tired of standing still, however, and my Eskimo 
friend said it would be all right for me to walk around if 
I would go a hundred yards off. He himself stood 
motionless on the leeward side of the hole (for the seal 
has a very keen sense of smell). Under his feet he had 
a pad of fox skin to give added protection from the cold. 
In his hand he held his sealing harpoon. Like all Eskimo 
harpoons, this had a detachable head to which there was 
attached a strong line — in this case braided caribou sinew, 
but strong leather thongs are sometimes used. 

We had been there several hours waiting for our seal 
to rise when another Eskimo came up who had not had 
luck finding a breathing hole. With his dog the new- 
comer started searching around in about a fifty-yard 
circle. Finally his dog found another of our seal's 
breathing holes. He then took his dog and tethered 
him over by our dog about a hundred yards away from 
either hole. The newcomer then set his indicator exactly 



278 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

as my friend had done and now the two waited for the 
seal. They also encouraged me to walk around at a con- 
siderable distance from either of them, stamping on the 
snow here and there. The idea was to try to scare the 
seal away from whatever hole he might be using to one or 
the other of those that were now being watched. 

It may have been that I scared the seal from some dis- 
tant hole to the one watched by the newcomer, for all 
of a sudden I saw him come to alert attention. Knowing 
that the seal was about to come up, I approached stealth- 
ily to within about ten yards and watched. When a seal 
is approaching the breathing hole that contains an indi- 
cator, the wave motion in the water created by his swim- 
ming will start the indicator trembling while the animal 
is still some distance off. When he finally comes right 
into the torpedo-shaped chamber and rises straight up 
through the water to press his nose against the breathing 
hole, he touches the lower end of the rod. If it strikes 
him squarely on the middle of his snout he will lift it up; 
but if it strikes slantingly, as it nearly always does, then 
instead of being lifted up, the indicator slips down deeper 
than before. Just at that moment the hunter drives his 
harpoon down alongside of the indicator. If he hits the 
hole in the ice he hits the seal, for his nose is at that 
moment in the hole. 

In this case the hunter made no slip and in a moment 
he was struggling with a powerful animal that had been 
harpooned in the side of the neck. The other hunter 
rushed up and by the braided sinew rope one of them 
held the animal while the other got his ice chisel and 
enlarged the hole until it was something over a foot in 
diameter, or large enough to pull the seal out. While 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS 279 

this was going on, the dogs were watching attentively, 
not only because they knew that the hunt was in progress, 
but also because experience had taught them that their 
turn to help would soon come. 

After killing the seal by a rap on the head the man who 
had caught it went over to fetch his dog. The seal 
hunter's dog always wears a light leather harness. This 
does not incommode him at all in walking. When the 
seal has been killed, it is fastened to the harness by a 
leather trace a few feet long and the dog is told to go 
drag it home. If we had caught our seal early in the 
day the dog would have gone home alone dragging the 
catch up to the door of his master's house, while the 
hunter went across the ice to some neighbor he saw 
watching at another seal hole to co-operate with him as 
our second hunter had in this case co-operated with us. 
But we did not get our seal until it was almost time to go 
home, so we followed the dog as he dragged the seal to 
camp. 

This method of sealing is little used in most Eskimo 
districts and not at all in others because the winds and 
currents break up the ice enough so that you can get 
seals in the open water all winter. There are two kinds 
of localities where the method is the only one available. 
These are on one hand such enclosed bodies of water 
as Coronation Gulf, and on the other the stretches far 
away from land (one or several hundred miles) where 
the currents are so sluggish that the ice remains all winter 
in unbroken masses, hundreds of square miles in area. 
In my various exploratory journeys I have had little use 
for the mauttok method, but I have always carried it in 
my mind and felt about it as one feels about an accident 



a8o HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

insurance policy — it is unnecessary as long as all goes 
well, but a very good thing to have up your sleeve in case 
of hard luck. 

The third method of seal hunting is the most important 
in the sense that most seals are killed by it, but it is 
so simple that it is-hardly worth describing. Where the 
offshore ice is broken up, you simply take your station 
near the edge of the landfast ice early in the morning 
and watch the water, waiting for a seal to appear. You 
may see none when you first arrive at the open water, 
and you may see none all day. It has happened to me 
that I have sat at the edge of open water day after day 
for a week without seeing a seal. But luck will turn 
and eventually they will come. 

It has also happened that when I came to the edge of 
the water in the early morning I saw dozens of seals 
within shooting distance and had as many as I wanted 
killed within a few minutes. In traveling we never want 
more than one at a time, but when we are spending the 
winter in some settled camp we like to secure enough in 
the fall to last all winter. We seldom succeed in doing 
that, however, and usually it is necessary even when 
living in one place to do at least a little hunting during 
the winter. In a way this is really best for it keeps camp 
life from becoming monotonous. 

The only point about hunting seals in open water is 
that you must shoot them through the head. When 
spying around, the seal will often lift himself out of the 
water so high that you could shoot him through the heart, 
but if you make an opening through his body, and espe- 
cially if you perforate the lungs, he is very likely to sink. 
At the hunting season in the fall, we estimate that of seals 
shot through the head nine out of ten will float. If seals 



HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT SEALS &8i 

are shot through the body, many of them will sink — any- 
thing from one out of four to one out of two. 

There are two kinds of seals that we hunt north of 
Canada and north of Alaska; the ordinary seal (phoca 
hispida) and the bearded seal (erignathus barbatus). 
Even the largest of the common seals do not go much 
over two hundred pounds, but the bearded seals may run 
up to eight hundred pounds. Both are valuable for food, 
but most people prefer the bearded seals. The great 
difficulty about them, however, is that when killed in the 
water they usually sink, and when harpooned through a 
hole in the ice, they are so strong that they may pull 
the harpoon line from the hands of the hunter and swim 
off with it. There are Eskimos whose hands have been 
cut to the bone by the rope slipping through them as the 
seal was getting away. 



CHAPTER III 

HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 

Among land animals the polar bears are the most power- 
ful of all beasts of prey. When full grown they may be 
three times as big as the biggest African lion. Their 
white color makes them difficult to see against a back- 
ground of snow or ice, and few animals have more intelli- 
gence. It is important therefore that the hunter (and 
especially people like us who live by hunting) shall under- 
stand their nature and habits thoroughly. 

Some say the Kadiak bears of southwestern Alaska 
are larger than polar bears. Even if this be so, they are 
far less dangerous, for a grizzly is chiefly vegetarian in his 
diet. But polar bears live exclusively by hunting seals 
and under certain circumstances they are likely to mis- 
take people for seals and attack them on that basis. This 
makes them, in my experience at least, far more danger- 
ous than the grizzly. I have killed thirteen grizzlies, but 
only for scientific purposes or else when badly in need 
of food. I always avoid killing grizzlies when I can. 
With all their strength and their splendid weapons of 
teeth and claws they are generally retiring and will avoid 
a man whenever they can. It is possible that polar bears 
also would avoid men if they knew what they were. But 
they so frequently mistake us for seals that it makes 
little practical difference to us what they might do if they 
really knew what we were. 

There is wide spread a curious belief about polar bears 

282 



HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 283 

— that they live mainly or partly on fish. This belief 
probably arose from the well-known fact that black bears 
and grizzlies in forests and mountains frequently eat fish. 
The belief has been confirmed when people about to write 
zoological or geographical text-books for schools have 
visited zoological gardens and have found that polar bears 
in captivity eat fish. The reason why they are fed fish 
in captivity is primarily that fish is cheaper than meat. 
I have killed many dozens of polar bears and have seen 
hundreds of others, but I have yet to find any evidence 
that they eat fish or try to catch them. Neither have I 
met any Eskimo who believes that polar bears ever try 
to catch fish. 

When I first lived at Tuktuyaktok in 1906, we had bear 
fat to eat with our fish. Two or three bears had been 
killed in the early fall before I arrived and their meat had 
been eaten immediately but some of the fat had been 
saved against winter. After my arrival no bears were 
found in that locality and I went home at the end of my 
first polar expedition without ever having seen a bear. 

My first bear hunt came on my second expedition, the 
winter of 1909-10. It was not really my bear hunt but 
that of some Eskimos who were living on the north coast 
of Alaska east of Point Barrow. 

The time was mid-winter, and the sun even at noon did 
not rise above the southern horizon. It was not far 
below the horizon, though, for the clouds in the south were 
red and yellow and other sunset colors for several hours 
around noon each day, and there was light enough for 
aiming a rifle from nine-thirty in the morning until two- 
thirty in the afternoon. 

The Eskimos were living in a village of three houses 
with a total population of about twenty people. Traps 



284 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

were being set for foxes in the near neighborhood. For 
this and other reasons the Eskimos kept their dogs tied — 
otherwise they were liable to go afield and get caught in 
the traps. In mid-winter this would be serious, for al- 
though a dog never freezes his feet under ordinary 
circumstances, his foot would be frozen solid in an hour 
if held between the steel jaws of a trap. 

The people were at breakfast when the dogs set up a 
great racket. All the men rushed out with rifles in their 
hands. The morning light was not yet clear but they 
could see the slightly yellowish figure of a polar bear 
against the white of the hillside. He was standing two 
or three hundred yards off and apparently considering 
what to make of all the racket. As the first men were 
coming out his mind was made up and he started off along 
the coast at a rolling gallop. Some of the Eskimos rushed 
to where the dogs were tied and let go half a dozen of 
them. Each dog as he was freed flew like an arrow in 
the direction in which the bear had disappeared. A bear 
can run a good deal faster than a man but not nearly as 
fast as a dog, and inside of a mile the first dog caught up 
to him and bit him sharply in the heel, whereupon the 
bear turned around and tried to strike the dog with his 
fore paw. But the agility of a dog is superior to that of 
a bear and if he has good footing he is certain to avoid 
the blows aimed at him. 

The first dog was soon joined by the second and later 
by all the rest. They made a howling and snapping ring 
round the bear. It did not make any difference which 
dog he faced, there would be another dog at his heels to 
bite him. 

Had there been but one Eskimo hunter all might have 
been well. From this adventure and from several others 



HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 285 

of the same kind, I learned that whenever possible there 
should be but a single hunter at a bear hunt. With a 
party of white men it is nearly impossible to manage this, 
for unless they are old hands they become daffy with 
excitement whenever a bear turns up. Eskimos are little 
better, especially the youngsters who have never seen a 
bear or at least have never helped kill one. In this case, 
there were eight or ten Eskimos, ranging in age from boys 
of ten or twelve to the leading man of the community who 
was about fifty. As they came they shouted to each 
other and to the dogs. 

The polar bear evidently realized that there was more 
danger from the men than the dogs, so he set off again at 
a gallop. But the dogs nipped his heels so viciously 
that he did not have quite the strength of mind to con- 
tinue running and turned again in an attempt to corner 
one of the dogs against an ice hummock. Several delays 
of this sort eventually enabled the hunters to get within 
shooting distance and a fusillade began. The old man 
begged the others not to shoot for fear of killing some 
of the dogs, but most of the excited hunters paid no 
attention to him. His intention was the sensible one of 
getting within ten or fifteen yards of the scrimmage and 
then watching for an opportunity to fire when no dogs 
were in line with the bullets. Waiting his chance he 
would have shot the bear near the heart and everything 
would have been over. But before he got near enough, 
one dog had been wounded by a stray bullet and just 
as the old man was about to kill the bear, a second bullet 
struck another dog and killed him instantly. The bear 
already had two or three flesh wounds which he appeared 
to mistake for dog bites, for each time he was hit he 
made redoubled efforts to catch the dogs. When the old 



286 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

man at last got a shot in, the bear fell dead. He found 
on walking up that the dog killed was the leader of his 
team and his favorite dog. He told me himself later that 
he would rather have ten bears escape than lose one such 
dog. This was partly sentiment; but even in money one 
good leader dog was worth as much as the skins of two 
or three bears. 

I have seen several other hunts where dogs were set on 
bears and I have read a great deal about this sort of hunt- 
ing which is common in Greenland and has been employed 
by certain explorers who work in that locality. The more 
I see and the more I read, the less inclined I am to favor 
the method. It is too dangerous to the dogs and if you 
are a good bear hunter you can get the bear well enough 
without the use of dogs. 

Although polar bears are much more dangerous than 
grizzly bears, the risk to men in hunting them is com- 
monly overrated. Still, there may be danger, as the 
following story shows: 

It was in the early spring of 191 o. Our party were on 
their way from the Mackenzie district by sled eastward 
along the north coast of the mainland. We were travel- 
ing along the shore of Dolphin and Union Straits. The 
coastline is fairly straight and much of the land right 
along the coast is low, but a short distance inland there 
are the foothills of a range of low mountains that run 
roughly parallel to the coast. My three Eskimo com- 
panions with our dog team had orders to travel about 
fifteen miles a day eastward along the coast and to camp 
at any suitable locality when they estimated that the 
fifteen-mile distance had been traversed. Our custom 
was that immediately after breakfast every morning I 
would leave the camp and walk about three miles directly 



HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 287 

inland. This took me about an hour, during which the 
Eskimos chatted and enjoyed themselves. At the end 
of the first hour I would turn eastward to walk from hill- 
top to hilltop parallel to the coast and approximately 
three miles inland. About this time the Eskimos would 
come out of the camp and commence preparing in a 
leisurely way for the day's march. They would pull 
down the tent, roll up the bedding, load everything on 
the sled and hitch up the dogs. Designedly this was 
done slowly, and by the time they were ready to start I 
would be five or six miles ahead of them. 

Occasionally during the day they would stop at some 
promontory and with their field glasses scan the country 
inland from them and ahead for sight of me or for any 
signal. My custom was that if I saw game I would heap 
up a pile of stones on top of some hill. This would be 
a sign to the Eskimos that I would probably kill game 
about abreast of this monument. They would, accord- 
ingly, camp on the coast at the point nearest to the 
monument and then come inland with an empty sled to 
fetch any meat I might have secured. 

We had also a system of signals which could be inter- 
preted at a distance through field glasses. In some cases 
when I saw game I sat down on a hilltop and waited until 
I saw through my field glasses that the Eskimos had 
stopped and were surveying the country through their 
glasses. As soon as they saw me, they would make a 
signal which I could see, whereupon I would stand up 
and make signals which they in turn could interpret in 
one of half a dozen ways. The signal might mean that 
they were to camp and stay in camp, or might mean that 
they were to camp and then come inland for meat. Again 
the meaning might be that they could proceed to the next 



288 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

suitable camping place and there await my arrival. In 
some cases I signaled to them that the game in sight was 
more convenient for them to kill than for me, whereupon 
two of them would immediately set off in the direction I 
indicated while the third made camp. 

On the day in question I had seen no trace of game. 
I had been walking rapidly and must have been about five 
or six miles ahead of my companions. The mountains 
were running so near the coast at this place that my 
course was less than a mile from the beach. Up to that 
time we had on this journey depended for our living on 
caribou and grizzly bears. But now there were no signs 
of either, so I took up my position on a conspicuous hill 
and decided to spend an hour or so in a careful study 
of the sea ice through my field glasses in the hope of 
discovering either a sleeping seal or possibly a polar 
bear. 

I had been examining the ice for some time when I 
noticed a spot which seemed to me more yellow than ice 
ought to be. It was about a mile from the coast out 
among the rough ice. I watched this for a long time 
but saw no motion. That was not conclusive in itself 
for a polar bear, especially after a full meal of seal meat, 
is likely to sleep for hours and even for the larger part 
of a day. Accordingly, I continued sitting and studying 
the ice elsewhere as well as the mountains behind me, 
occasionally turning my glasses to the yellow spot to see 
if it were still there. I think I had done this three or 
four times and my mind was just about made up to 
proceed along the coast and assume that the yellow spot 
was nothing but ice, when on looking back I failed to 
see it. It was a bear then and had started traveling or 
else had gotten up, moved a little way and lain down 



HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 289 

again behind a hummock where it would be invisible. If 
the animal was traveling, I should presently see it passing 
over some open space. I watched for a while but saw 
nothing. Evidently then the bear had merely made a 
short move and had gone to sleep behind a hummock. 

I knew that when I got down on the sea ice it would be 
difficult to keep my bearings. The winter storms had 
broken the ice badly and it was heaped up in a chaos 
of hummocks that had the angular outline of very rugged 
mountains, although the highest peaks were no more than 
forty or fifty feet. When you get down among such ice, 
it is almost as if you were in a forest. You can see the 
neighboring hummocks and the sky above you, but you 
get no good view of your surroundings. When you climb 
to the top of even the highest crags of ice, you get a 
view of the tops of all the other crags, although here and 
there a little ice valley may open. But the mountains 
are so much higher than the ice that a man out on the 
ice can always get a view of them by climbing on a 
hummock. I accordingly memorized the mountains care- 
fully so that by glancing back at them occasionally and 
keeping certain peaks in line I would be able to travel 
straight out upon the ice in the direction where the bear 
had disappeared. 

Once certain of having my bearings right, I put my 
field glasses in their case and ran as fast as I could down 
the slope, for it was possible the bear might get up any 
time and move on. When I had traveled out on the ice 
about the estimated distance, I climbed on a hummock 
and spent some time looking around but saw nothing. 
The campaign now was to move from hummock to hum- 
mock for, say, a quarter of a mile until I felt sure that I 
had passed on beyond the bear. I would then begin 



290 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

to circle until I came upon the animal or else upon its 
tracks. 

I was still thinking that the bear was ahead of me and 
was clambering down from a high ridge when I heard 
behind me a noise something like the hiss of an angry 
goose. From this point I shall tell the story as I wrote 
it down many years ago in my book "My Life With the 
Eskimo." 

My rifle was buckled in its case slung across my back, and 
I was slowly and cautiously clambering down the far side of 
a pressure ridge, when I heard behind me a noise like the spit- 
ting of a cat or the hiss of a goose. I looked back and saw, 
about twenty feet away and almost above me, a polar bear. 

Had he come the remaining twenty feet as quietly and 
quickly as a bear can, the literary value of the incident would 
have been lost forever; for, as the Greek fable points out, a 
lion does not write a book. From his eye and attitude, as well 
as the story his trail told afterward there was no doubting his 
intentions: the hiss was merely his way of saying, "Watch me 
do it ! " Or at least that is how I interpreted it ; possibly the 
motive was chivalry, and the hiss was his way of saying Garde! 
Whichever it was, it was the fatal mistake of a game played 
well to that point; for no animal on earth can afford to give 
warning to a man with a rifle. And why should he? Has a 
hunter ever played fair with one of them? 

Afterward the snow told plainly the short — and for one of 
the participants, tragic — story. I had overestimated the bear's 
distance from shore, and had passed the spot where he lay, 
going a hundred yards or two to windward; on scenting me 
he had come up the wind to my trail, and had then followed 
it, walking about ten paces to leeward of it, apparently fol- 
lowing my tracks by smelling them from a distance. The rea- 
son I had not seen his approach was that it had not occurred 
to me to look back over my own trail ; I was so used to hunting 



HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 291 

bears that the possibility of one of them assuming my own 
role and hunting me had been left out of consideration. A 
good hunter, like a good detective, should leave nothing out 
of consideration. 



In 1 9 14 we were traveling over the moving ice pack 
north of Alaska. The ice in that vicinity was composed 
of islands, most of them several miles in diameter, and 
some of them as much as twenty or thirty miles in dia- 
meter, although a few were no larger than a city block 
and others even smaller. Like real islands, these were 
separated by water, but they were different from ordinary 
islands in being in continual motion and in bunting against 
each other as they moved. The motion was so very slow 
that it was scarcely perceptible, and when the islands 
collided, there was no shock that would knock you off 
your feet but merely a quiver and a groaning, grinding 
noise as one island crushed and broke the edges of an- 
other. The ice that made up the islands was of varying 
thickness, in few places less than three or four feet, and 
in many places as much as fifty or a hundred feet. The 
fifty or hundred-foot ice is not produced by continuous 
freezing, as in a lake, but rather by having thinner ice 
broken up and one cake heaped upon another until they 
are piled ten, fifteen or twenty layers deep. The differ- 
ent ice pieces later freeze together, making solid masses of 
great thickness. 

Traveling over such ice we usually found a place where 
the corner of one island touched the corner of another, 
giving us a chance to cross over. But in one place we 
found that our island was not touching any other ice 
ahead of us. The water lane between us and the next 
island was only a dozen or two yards across and seemed to 



29a HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

us to be getting narrower. We decided, accordingly, to 
stop and wait to see what would happen. We could have 
rigged up a device we called a sled boat for ferrying our 
party across, but this would have been a lot of bother 
and did not seem necessary, for the prospect was that in 
a few hours the ice masses would come together and we 
could then keep on our journey. Expecting only a short 
wait, we did not unhitch our dogs and everything was in 
readiness to start whenever a crossing became possible. 

In the open water that was delaying us the seals were 
numerous. We killed some, fed our dogs, and made a 
great bonfire of blubber to boil a pot of fresh meat. 

In the winter time we keep our rifles, field glasses and 
other similar things outdoors at all times. If they were 
taken into the house, moisture would form on them and 
this would be injurious. In the case of a rifle, it would 
cause rust on the inside of the barrel and that is the 
most important part of the rifle. During the winter 
there is no appreciable rust so long as the gun is kept 
outdoors, but now spring was approaching and with sum- 
mer weather and increasing temperature there was likely 
to be rust. Under such conditions, it is my custom to oil 
the inside of the rifle barrel immediately after it has been 
used. In this case I had not only oiled my rifle, but I 
had put it in its case and strapped it on top of one of the 
sleds to be ready for the start. 

We were sitting, around the campfire enjoying our meal 
of boiled seal meat, when the dogs all at once commenced 
a great racket. From this point I shall allow Burt Mc- 
Connell to tell the story. He is now one of the editors 
of the Literary Digest but was then the youngest mem- 
ber of my ice-exploring party. He had never before 
seen a polar bear, and so this was a great event for him. 



HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 293 

"We had been traveling with Stefansson northward 
over the moving ice of the Arctic Ocean in March and 
April of 19 14 when, on the thirteenth day out, we were 
halted by a narrow lead of open water. The next morn- 
ing, in the hope that a crossing might be found to the west- 
ward, the Commander started out, followed by Storkerson, 
Andreasen, Johansen, Crawford and myself, with the 
sleds and dogs. We followed the edge of the ice for an 
hour or more, when Storkerson saw a seal suddenly poke 
its head out of the water. At about the same time the 
Commander found a huge cake of ice adrift in the open 
lead, which was only about fifty feet wide at that point. 
Here was a ferry already built, so while we were getting 
the teams ready to go aboard the ferry the Commander 
and Storkerson walked along the lead in different direc- 
tions in search of seals for dog food and for our own 
dinner. Four were shot in the course of an hour, then 
Storkerson set to work to make out of an empty tin can 
a stove which would burn seal blubber. 

"Little did we think that the odor of the burning seal 
blubber and cooking seal meat would bring a polar bear 
into our camp, but that is just what it did. We had 
placed the dogs on the ferry, skinned a seal, made the 
stove, built a fire in it, and were cooking seal meat with 
the blubber from the same carcass for fuel when we were 
brought to our feet by a great commotion among the dogs. 
The Commander and Storkerson, who were nearest, ran 
toward the dogs to stop what they thought was a fight 
among them, and Crawford and I followed. I did not 
notice any special cause for the commotion until Storker- 
son yelled to us, 'It's a bear!' 

"Knowing that our lives depended upon our dogs, and 
that a polar bear could kill one with a single blow of his 



294 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

powerful paw, everybody now ran to the assistance of the 
Commander and Storkerson. There were only two rifles 
on the sleds, however, so there was little that we could do 
except restrain the dogs from dragging the sleds into the 
water, in their eagerness to attack the bear. 

"The white, shaggy monster was only twenty-five feet 
from the dogs. Fortunately, he was on the opposite side 
of the open water. He did not appear to be in the 
least afraid of the dogs, which were rearing, plunging 
and barking in their eagerness to be at him. But he 
completely ignored them, and merely stood facing them, 
with his head hanging downward and swinging slowly 
from side to side. Then he would peer into the water for 
a moment, as if trying to make up his mind to plunge 
in and swim across. 

"Never in his life, it may safely be said, had this bear 
seen a dog. In fact, the only animals he had seen were 
foxes and seals, and he knew himself to be master of 
these. Perhaps these barking creatures were another 
species of fox. Well, he would plunge in, swim across, 
climb out on the other side with the aid of his powerful 
forelegs, and find out. By this time the Commander and 
Storkerson had arrived at the sleds which were separated 
from the bear by only a few feet of water, but the bear 
gave no heed to them or to the dogs, which by this time 
were in a perfect frenzy. He merely stood at the very 
edge of the ice, looking into the water, swaying from 
one side to the other like a polar bear in the zoo on a 
summer day, and swinging his ponderous head. 

"Storkerson was the first to reach his rifle, which was 
lying loose on top of the sled that was farthest from the 
bear. Just as it appeared that the bear had made up his 
mind to swim over and kill our dogs, Storkerson took 



HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 295 

aim quickly and fired. The bullet, a .30.30, hit the 
bear in the right foreleg, and knocked that member from 
under him, so that he turned a complete somersault into 
the water. It was at this juncture that I snapped a pic- 
ture, but it was not a success. When the bear came to 
the surface all thought of visiting us had vanished; his 
only idea now was to escape. 

"By this time, however, the Commander had unstrapped 
his rifle case and reached his rifle, which he had oiled and 
put away an hour before. The bear was wounded, and, 
while it might never menace our dogs again, it would be 
better to end its misery. So the Commander fired with 
his hard-shooting Gibbs-Mannlicher rifle as the now 
thoroughly frightened King of the Arctic clambered out 
upon the ice and started to limp away. This bullet 
knocked him over, but he got up again and in spite of 
a second hit from Storkerson's rifle, he disappeared be- 
hind a pressure ridge and was lost to view, leaving a broad 
trail of blood. 

"During the excitement, as we now noticed, the lead had 
narrowed so much that Crawford and I with the .30-.30 
rifle and the camera, were able to cross with the aid of a 
pair of skis and a long pole. We followed the trail of 
blood at a run, expecting at every turn to come upon the 
wounded animal, but we had proceeded almost half a 
mile before we saw him staggering along, holding his right 
foot clear of the ice. When he realized that he was being 
followed, he plunged into the first water he came to. It 
would be a simpler matter — so I thought — for Crawford 
to place a bullet in a vital place when the bear came to the 
surface. Three hasty shots inflicted only flesh wounds, 
however, and Crawford found that he had no more cart- 
ridges. I was about to run back to camp for more when 



296 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

the Commander appeared, bringing his Mannlicher. Al- 
though this rifle is of smaller caliber — .256 — one bullet in 
the bear's heart killed him instantly as he clambered out 
upon the ice. 

"In a sense, this misfortune to the bear was his own 
fault. The smell of the burning seal blubber and cooking 
seal-meat had attracted him from five miles away, as we 
later learned by studying his trail. On cutting him up, 
we saw he had not been hungry. Had he had the sense 
to study us from a distance of a hundred yards or even 
twenty-five yards, we should not have fired at him, for 
we had plenty of seal meat. But we had seen him first 
only a few feet away from our dogs and apparently hesi- 
tating only momentarily before plunging in to swim the 
narrow water lane that separated him from them. We 
fired the first shot to protect our dogs, and the others 
merely to put a wounded animal out of misery." 

The last bear story of this book will be told by Harold 
Noice. Noice was born in Kansas City but brought up 
in Seattle. He was a boy fresh out of high school when 
he went to the Arctic Ocean on the whaling ship Polar 
Bear. The summer of 191 5 we met the Polar Bear and 
purchased her to take the place of a ship our expedition 
had lost. Some of the crew of the Polar Bear stayed 
with the ship and joined our expedition. One of these 
was Noice. He accompanied us on two of our longest 
sledge journeys. He enjoyed the Arctic so much that 
when we sailed south in 19 18 he asked to be allowed to 
remain behind, and spent four more years there studying 
the Eskimos of Coronation Gulf — till the fall of 192 1. 
The story he tells here happened the spring of 19 16 when 
we had discovered Meighen Island and were on our way 



HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 297 

back south to the base camp of our expedition in Banks 
Island. The spot where the story happened was on the 
sea ice twenty or thirty miles away from land and about 
seven hundred miles north of the arctic circle. 

"Of all my hunting experiences extending over a period 
of six and a half years spent within the arctic circle, the 
most exciting was an encounter with a polar bear. Out- 
side of parks and zoological gardens, it was the first I had 
ever seen at close range. The incident happened on one 
of my journeys with Stefansson. We had discovered new 
land in Latitude 80 °N., Longitude ioo°W., and were 
returning over the ice to our base camp some four hun- 
dred and fifty miles to the southward. 

"One night just after we had pitched our tent fifteen 
yards from an open lead and after the Commander and I 
had gone inside, Charlie Andersen, the third member of 
our party, was about to follow us when he noticed some- 
thing white moving in the water of the lead about two 
hundred yards from our tent. He thought at first that 
it was a piece of drifting ice; but when it began to move 
too rapidly for that, he picked up his binoculars to see 
what it really was. As he was focusing them upon the 
object it disappeared beneath the surface of the water, 
reappearing a little nearer to our camp. Charlie now saw 
that it was no chunk of ice but the head of a swimming 
polar bear. 

"When Charlie called to us that a bear was swimming in 
the lead about two hundred yards away, I rushed out 
instantly. But the Commander was used to polar bears 
and did not get so excited. He put on his boots in a 
leisurely way before coming out and then stationed him- 



298 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

self at the stern of our sled, telling me to take up my 
position at the bow. 

"The sled was broadside to the lead. Charlie stood 
behind us where the dogs were tied, ready to quell any 
disturbance they might, make when they caught sight of 
the bear. 

"We waited patiently for the bear to come opposite. It 
is difficult to drag a heavy bear out of the water after he 
is shot, so we thought we could wait until he climbed out 
upon the ice before shooting him. 

"Evidently the bear had seen the dogs sleeping in a row 
on the ice and had taken them to be seals. For at that 
time of the year seals like to lie on top of the ice beside 
their holes or beside open leads, basking in the warm sun- 
shine. Polar bears make their living by sneaking up to 
these basking seals unawares, so it was not strange he 
should mistake the dogs for seals. The sled and tent 
looming up black against the white background resembled 
dirty ice, but as bears are used to seeing dirty ice he did 
not pay any particular attention to this. 

"Thinking no doubt that he was soon to have a feed of 
fine fat seal meat, the bear took great pains in stalking 
the dogs. He would swim slowly back and forth across 
the lead, occasionally lifting his head a little above the 
level of the ice to see if the (supposed) seals had noticed 
him. The dogs were tired from their day's work and 
were lying stretched out comfortably asleep on the ice and 
suspecting no danger. 

"Finally the bear reached a spot nearly opposite us. 
Stealthily he raised his massive forepaws upon the ice. 
Then quickly but without a sound, he lifted himself out 
of the water and in an instant this ferocious beast with 
its wicked pig-like eyes and yellow-fanged snarling 



HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 299 

muzzle, was nearly on top of us. Stefansson and I were 
crouched down behind the sled about three yards apart 
with only our heads showing. The bear was headed 
directly for Stefansson, giving me a quartering view. He 
was coming so fast that he had covered more than half 
the distance to us when I fired. At the report of my rifle 
the bear rolled over, turning a somersault towards us 
before he stopped, for he was going so fast. Stefansson 
told me to fire again, for our now frantically barking dogs 
were in danger should the wounded bear turn towards 
where they were tied. I pulled on the trigger, but it 
would not budge — my gun was jammed. The Com- 
mander then used his Mannlicher-Schoenauer and 
finished the job. I found later that sand had become 
lodged under the rim of my cartridge and had prevented 
it from slipping all the way into the chamber. The 
Winchester safety device had therefore prevented the 
hammer from falling when I pulled on the trigger — other- 
wise the gun would have back-fired and I might not have 
been able to write this story. 

"After the bear had been killed, Charlie started to 
laugh at me for getting 'buck-fever' and hitting the bear 
in the leg. Now this was the first bear I had ever shot 
at, and as our Commander had shot dozens during his 
many years of hunting in the North, he had said I might 
kill this one. It might seem you could not miss so huge 
an animal as a bear coming almost straight at you, but 
you must remember I was pretty excited. The muzzle 
of my gun was probably describing wobbly curves when 
I was about to fire, for my heart was thumping about 
one hundred to the minute. It was therefore largely a 
matter of luck whether my bullet hit the bear's head or 
his feet, or missed him entirely. I knew this, but still 



3 oo HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

I felt sure it was I that had brought the bear down, until 
the Commander remarked that he also had fired at him. 
The two guns had gone off so nearly together that neither 
Charlie nor I knew that he had fired. 

"Now the question arose, Who killed the bear? He 
had been hit in the f orepaw and also in the shoulder. As 
I had never shot at a bear, Charlie insisted it was my 
bullet that had struck him in the paw. But I feel pretty 
strongly I could not have missed that badly. The Com- 
mander improved things a good deal by suggesting that 
when an animal is charging and when you are low down, 
its paws may well be in a straight line with its heart. 
It was even possible the same bullet might have passed 
through the paw and later lodged in the shoulder. His 
final verdict was that for purposes of record it might as 
well be considered my bear — he had killed enough of 
them before. I like to feel he missed that bear, but I 
must admit that (if so) it was the only poor shot I ever 
knew him to make at a charging polar bear, or indeed at 
any animal he needed to kill. I have since seen a number 
of polar bears but none of them have seemed to me so 
large or so ferocious as this one — none of them ever had 
the 'wicked pig-like eyes' and 'snarling yellow-fanged 
muzzle' of my first bear — which, when dead, presented 
an entirely different appearance. It turned out to be a 
rather small two-year-old. 

"Since returning to civilization I have heard some of 
my friends who hunt in Alaska or Africa tell thrilling and 
hair-raising stories of their adventures with grizzlies and 
lions. I have heard them describe the lion charging with 
wide-open mouth and terrifying roars into the very arms 
of the cool, level-headed amateur hunters. Perhaps I 
am giving them less credit than they deserve but I just 



HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 301 

can't help judging other people's lions by my first polar 
bear. Although I know my friends to be truthful in 
everyday matters, I usually take their most thrilling 
stories with just a grain of salt." 



END 



THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 

By VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 

To a world long shackled by unfounded and superstitious no- 
tions of the Polar regions, this explorer-scientist-philosopher- 
author returns from five years in the unknown North and brings 
a narrative to abolish Arctic heroics and open a new chapter in 
the progress of civilization. It is a tale of wonder and charm 
which will be a landmark among the proofs of the ultimate tri- 
umph of common sense. The story of the years 1913-18. 

Price $6.00. Pp. v-784, with maps. 

MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

By VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 

A book of adventure and sport with Indian and Eskimo, told 
with skill and dry humor by tbe only explorer who has mastered 
the difficult Eskimo tongue. Exploration in untrodden lands, the 
thrill of new scenes, make this volume a continuous delight to a 
civilization-bound reader, while the culminating discovery of the 
famous "Blond Eskimo" of mysterious origin (whom Stefansson 
calls the "Copper Eskimo") achieves a dramatic climax rare in 
modern books of travel. The story of the years 1908-12. 

Price $6.50. Pp. vii-527, with maps. 

"I am simply spell-bound with 'The Friendly Arctic' and find 
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sir edmund walkek, President, Canadian Bank of Commerce. 

"I have just finished 'The Friendly Arctic' and have found it 
incomparably the most engrossing book on Polar work I have 
ever read." 

E. Gordon bill, Dean, Dartmouth College. 

"Stefansson's work, taken as a whole, is one of the most nota- 
ble achievements of our times." 

prof. Raymond pearl, Johns Hopkins University. 

"^"Stefansson proved that in the farthest Arctic the sea supplied 
food even more abundantly than the land . . . Unknown areas of 
vast extent have been explored and many illusions with respect 
to Arctic conditions have been dissipated. The results accom- 
plished by this expedition would have been impossible if Stefans- 
son had been a man of less resource and courage." 

sir Robert bobden, Premier of Canada. 

PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 Fifth Avenue NEW YORK 



THE NORTHWARD COURSE OF 
EMPIRE 

By VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 

Mr. Stefansson believes that the opening up of the 
great northern regions of America and Asia will be as 
important for the world as the opening up of America 
was hundreds of years ago; that these northern regions 
are the hope of relief from the overcrowding that is 
menacing our times. In this book he gives a brief sum- 
mary of the history, the climate, and other conditions in 
the North, as they bear upon the problems of coloniza- 
tion. $2.00. 



HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 

By VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 

A book for the young of all ages in whom there is alive 
the love of pushing into the unknown. Mr. Stefansson 
tells here of how he became an explorer and of his first 
trip into the Arctic. He gives all the details that every 
one wants to know : how he learned to build a snow house 
and to be comfortable in one; how he learned to hunt 
seals and caribou and to travel by land and sea and to 
live in comfort ; what the Eskimos are like and how they 
live; and just what sort of a place the "Great North" is. 
Written after eleven years of exploration, this is a 
ripened account of early adventures informed by later 
experiences. $2.50. 

PUBLISHED BY 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 

1 West 47th St. NEW YORK 



